Your pet's microchip may now be useless after chip company goes out of business (opens in new tab)

> I believe there is nothing preventing you from registering the same number with multiple registries

Most cities require you to register your pet and get a license. Part of that process is to share the microchip number, vaccine records, vet info etc. Our local animal shelter usually checks with the city if a microchip is found but no ownership is established.

DNS would be fine, too. At minimum, a LOC record for a helpful neighbor.

Because how else can they make someone depend on them after the sell?

I see this also with QR codes. I see tons in for, example, restaurants which contain a link to some private company which automatically redirects to the restaurant's own page. They can get it for free if they just put their own url in the qr code directly (if they knew it was possible, of course. They're nontechnical). But then the other company keeps charging you money just to serve pointless 301s

The chip will still be working after 24PetWatch is gone, you can enroll the same serial to more providers i.e. AKC Reunite.

there's no point in getting another chip. the existing chip will still work, you can just register the data with another database.

It's a permanent primary key into "an" owner database. Unfortunately, there are 40+ databases as there are that many registration companies. I don't even know if there's a unified interface to query all of them simultaneously. Does anyone know how the queries work if a pet be registered in some small or obscure registry that's not supported by every shelter/agency?

Dog tags are easy to replace. Microchips are not. Having a level of indirection allows the meaningful contact information to be updated as needed.

You don't want the chip to be reprogrammable or wipeable.