The .blog Bait & Switch

The .blog registry backtracked on its promise to send popular domains to auction. In May, co-founder and CEO of Automattic (WordPress) Matt Mullenweg announced that his company had won the auction to become the registry for the new .blog TLD:
I’m excited we won and think that it will be both an amazing business going forward and give lots of folks an opportunity to have a fantastic domain name in a new namespace and with an easy-to-say TLD. You can sign up to be first in line to reserve a domain here.
At the time the link led to a WordPress.com page where you could sign up for updates (the full get.blog website was not up yet). Thinking that chris.blog had a nice to ring to it, I signed up immediately.
Accepting Applications
On August 18th, I received this email:
Ok, let’s do this! The site listed chris.blog for $30/year. But when you clicked through you discovered that they require a $220 application fee (plus the $30 for the first year; a total of $250). I was ok with this price point as long as it would be refunded if I didn’t get the domain.
The site made no mention of whether the application fee was refundable, so I emailed the support team and they confirmed that it was
Source: https://managewp.org/articles/13857/the-blog-bait-switch

source https://williechiu40.wordpress.com/2016/11/18/the-blog-bait-switch/