The whole domain market experience is utter crap. Commoditizing domain names has created such an unbalanced power dynamic between buyers and sellers where the sellers hold all the power. Gatekeeping at it's finest.
Contrast this with acquiring a business name through any Department of State/Division of Corporations.
I shouldn't have to name my company some contorted bastardization to successfully enter the market.
Registering a trademark is generally more expensive than a domain name, and trademarks don't compete on the same namespace and is split depending on industry. The biggest difference to the domain market is that with domain names everyone is clogging the same namespace. If people just spread out based on nationality and industry it would be easy and cheap.
To make a direct example, if I talked about Abba here in Sweden, most people think about the music band. But if I talk about Abba in the context of food, people will instead think of Abba seafood that make Kalles Kaviar and pickled herring. Abba.se as a domain is thus very ambiguous as it doesn't specify if it about food or music, and abba.com is likely to surprise people as it has nothing to do with either.
To make matter worse, companies that want to protect their trademark or work actively at preventing fake shops will often buy several hundred versions of their domain names under different name spaces. It is seen as best practice, especially for online shops.
But at the same time, I think we might be a bit to far with the current setup of the web to change this. Not saying it can't be redesigned better, though. I can't see everyone moving to "abba.food.se" or "abba.music.se", especially as domain length is at a serious premium (though my information is old and it's just a correlation, it's the best factual support I could find short-notice for what is commonly known). [0]
There's a fine line between "clogging the namespace" and commoditizing something. I like being able to have my own domain - I can host stuff, run a web site, access services with a friendly name, attach friendly names to my internal IPs, etc. Why should I have to be a legally-registered something-or-other to do that? And if I'm not, why should I have to settle for something three times as long? Most of the pollution is from squatters, who are cancerous to the internet.
I actually did a "side project" to fix this about 10 years ago.
Never "released" it; I just wanted to see if it would work. I still think it could.
Imagine being being able to get a copy of a zone file and that file reliably revealing something about what was being served from the associated IP address. Where each name was by the nature of its tld disambiguated from any other name. "Collision-proof" naming. Arguably, it already exists IRL.
As a member of the public I can get a list, or search a database, of trademarks that reveals exactly what type of goods or services each mark ("name") covers. I do not need to submit each name/good/service I am interested in to a gatekeeper advertising company who will try to guess what it is I want based on other people's searches or personal information gathered about me.
OTOH, if, for example, a trademark office started running an authoritative nameserver, serving its own zone with its own descriptive tlds and giving trademark registrants a matching domain name within a class-specific tld, I would not hesistate to add those tlds to the custom root.zone I use.
It stands to reason that a business owner should trust a government entity with some accountability more than it trusts a made-up "authority" like ICANN.
The "organisation of the world's information" should not be controlled by a private company.
Any such company would obviously stand to benefit from the continued disorganisation of information on the web. A lack of organisation that only they have the "expertise" necessary to rectify. The ambiguity of ICANN domain names is one contributor to the ongoing state of disorganisation.
Nor should the control of domain names be entrusted to a private company. They, too, benefit from the ambiguity. The profits from selling (through contractors) dispute resolution services and then new tlds to trademark holders are only possible when the ambiguity continues to exist.
>Contrast this with acquiring a business name through any Department of State/Division of Corporations.
What do you mean by this?
Generally if a corporate name is registered (example: ABC, INC.) most states will not allow another “ABC” to be registered (even if ending in another suffix like “Corp” or even if another type of entity like an LLC).
I had a client in a certain state who registered their entity name as MSG HOLDINGS and wouldn’t you know I got a call from General Counsel of Madison Square Garden one day making an offer to purchase my clients entity solely for the name.
>I mean if a name is available to use, you can just use it. There's no negotiation, no price barrier, nothing.
How is that different in domain names? If the name is available, you buy it and use it. And the "price barrier" for domain names was less than filing incorporation paperwork, in my state anyway.
>I think most of my frustration is toward the domain squatting/reselling industry.
At least with domain names you can negotiate with someone. If someone else registers a company name before you, good luck. Same situation, look up the registered members and try to talk them into giving it to you, I guess?
> How is that different in domain names? If the name is available, you buy it and use it.
Because in the absence of price caps the registrar can choose to increase the price on "valuable" domain names (for whatever arbitrary criteria it decides means a domain is "valuable").
He wasn't speaking about .org domains specifically:
>The whole domain market experience is utter crap. Commoditizing domain names has created such an unbalanced power dynamic between buyers and sellers where the sellers hold all the power. Gatekeeping at it's finest.
He's speaking in the present/past tense, so obviously he can't be referring to what may happen in the future with .org domain names.
So I'm comparing incorporating a business purchasing a domain name, today.
Not anymore, that's exactly what the article is about.
> ICANN has agreed to remove price restrictions on .org domain names, letting the domain’s manager, Public Interest Registry, charge as much as it wants for the domains. (It also agreed to let .info manager Afilias charge whatever it wants for .info.)
You are wrong. All .org domains will be priced the same as will .info domains. They can't decide a particular .org domain is worth more than another (that has already been registered and is being used). They can charge what they want but they can't differentiate between domains. And the quote you gave essentially says that.
This is different than a completely new tld whereby they might decide that a name is premium. The point is no legacy domain will be priced as premium. I guess in theory if it expires they might be able to do that but the 'can charge what they want' will not impact existing domain registrations. And in the case of a valuable domain if that were released it would be grabbed at auction and not available for the simple registration fee.
The whole decentralize everything! movement seems to overlook DNS. I get that technically the DNS system is decentralized, but in reality, you lease a domain from a random, usually politically charged entity, who can do anything with it, if they wish.
We need a real DNS system, one where an individual can request and have a domain for life and which is truly decentralized.
Unfortunately none of the attempts - .onion with tor, .bit with namecoin, etc - seem to be working. .onion is despised because tor and impossible to memorize them; .bit never gained any traction and namecoin, being a bitcoin clone, has it's own issues.
> one where an individual can request and have a domain for life
Annual payment is proof that you're still alive.
AlterNIC tried settint up alternate tlds years ago, and is now gone. The problems are an alternate root is very unlikely to get consensus, and name resolution without consensus isn't very useful; and you're not going to be able to have friendly names without an arbiter to decide who gets pmlnr.example.
> Annual payment is proof that you're still alive.
I don't want my domains sold after I die, and I don't want my bookmarks to stop working after someone else dies.
The only parts of a website that I want tied to someone's lifespan is:
- whether or not the site is updated, and
- how the site is hosted
If I could snap my fingers and magically figure out a way to make the site's hosting outlive the person, I'd do that as well. For me, extend GP's original statement to read
> one where an individual can request a domain and have it removed from the market permanently.
Your vision sounds pretty terrible. At a very cursory glance it seems fine - I don't want my information web to degrade.
Once you dig even a little bit into this, though... you get a quagmire of old and useless information. Outdated sites never go away. They just become a constant burden on the whole system. Information that's been refuted and invalidated years back is still alive and kicking because a domain exists and can be indexed, and there's no chance to ever update it, since the owner is long since dead.
The longer this lasts, the more and more noise to information you get. It's like having an incredible information web and then giving it dementia.
I think it would be absolutely incredible to peruse old blogs and websites from a century ago. Clippings from 75 year old newspapers or letters are interesting for plenty of reasons. The cost of things; The news of the day; The writing style. Imagine direct access to this sort of content from 750 years ago!
The Wayback Machine is great, but it's basically a hack. Archiving shouldn't depend on a single centralized entity occasionally crawling the web and saving chunks of it to its archive (but only what it finds during the crawl, and excluding content with large file sizes, such as videos).
It ought to be built into the architecture of the Web, decentralized, immediate, and (at least for small file sizes) on by default. Oh, and censorship-resistant. Even for large file sizes, I think there ought to be some very easy-to-use mechanism to donate either hard disk space or money to publicly archive content of your choice.
Those are lofty goals, of course, but the current web has is quite vulnerable to bitrot as it is, and there's no guarantee the Internet Archive will continue to operate indefinitely.
Are there any other Web archives with scope comparable to the Wayback Machine? I have not heard of any. I guess there may be private archives which are not publicly known or accessible.
Remember, there only 2 real hard problems in computer science. Cache invalidation and naming things.
P.S. I'll add, that on the issue of a personal identifier, we need to remember that not everyone wants a public address. In fact most people keep this kind of information quite private. A virtual address is no different, unless we explicitly make two kinds.
How is this better than namecoin and how will it not end in same problem?
Also this really does not do what the person you responded to asked for - I can't get some personal domain name for life from this - it is market based AFAICT. Really seems to solve almost none of the problems and goes directly for what ICANN only now does with .org as no domain will have any price cap with handshake.
Claim from the site you linked to is not the same as your claim:
> Renewals for names are annual and cost a standard network fee. Miners will receive the transaction fee as part of their block reward.
This could mean:
- Fixed USD fee (it is not this one)
- Fixed coin fee (don't think it is this one either) - but coin price is marked based - so fee is market based
- Price does not depend on domain name but miners basically decide the fee like it is with other cryptos (think it is this one) - still market based - and actually could be gamed to make it higher for some domain names
Can you explain how the miners can price discriminate against certain domains? Seems like the network fee would need to be identical for every concurrent transaction.
In which case you can just wait until there are less transactions waiting to be confirmed, driving the price up (it's a renewal, so you have plenty of time to complete it).
Namecoin is a great project. One of the issues however is that it introduced a .bit which essentially meant it was a new system/tld. Furthermore, the existing stakeholders in the naming system (domain owners) did not have an easy way to join the system without risk of losing their name or being sold their own name at a high price.
Handshake mitigates this by replacing the root zone entirely and, in addition, allowing existing stakeholders (.com, etc) to continue to own their existing assets.
> We need a real DNS system, one where an individual can request and have a domain for life and which is truly decentralized.
I very much want this also - but this cannot be solved in the same way as the challenge of business domain name assignment - a different approach should be used:
[idx].[yyyyddmm].[given_names].[family_name].id
e.g.
023.19830210.john_smith_3rd.doe.id
given_names can have some standard seperator
And then if there are two people with same given names with same family name they get different indexes. And this will get everyone riled up because this means you will need a worldwide consistent database of people and you will only be able to get this if you give very good proof of ID and then this because your world ID number basically.
Unless someone goes out their way to choose their own 'branded' name perhaps they could just receive a unique hash of their name for a domain? Tools can always be built to handle these names so you're not memorising such lengthy domains.
How do you decide which person get which name? This just gets you back to the whole ICANN problem. I can remember a couple of digits which makes my name unique. I cannot remember 1e873645-1f68-4b48-9eae-934ec717229b
That's just a technical problem that new infrastructure can solve by abstracting away the name. Instead of visiting 1e873645-1f68-4b48-9eae-934ec717229b.com/foo, you're just visiting "bar/foo", where 'bar' is their name. Click on the URL and the full hashed version is revealed for proper sharing.
In the same way that nobody memorised Facebook's UUID of a person, they can just remember their name.
During the socialist system one received a personal identification number. It was very similar to this.
The good side:
- I like the idea and I have been thinking around the same lines
The bad side:
- how would changed names, like marriage, be handled?
- it shows too much PII - I believe knowing a domain like this would immediately fall under GDPR
- still not easy to remember
- doesn't allow pseudonyms - I know that pseudonyms might look like they go against request a domain for life, but they don't. In our culture, are name is given by someone else and/or inherited, but many would like to associate their presence with something they decide on their own.
> how would changed names, like marriage, be handled?
The same way it works with NI numbers in the UK and SS numbers in the US, you tell the agency about the change and that's that.
Why would a number being associated with your person have any issue about your name changing? the very purpose is to disassociate the name from being a unique identifier.
Norway still uses a very similar system and I think other countries also.
You do raise very valid problems though - but I feel like either you have at least some of those problems or you go to routes which is basically what .onion does where you have your_chosen_name + bit_of_not_memorable
> Regarding the removal of price caps, we would like to underscore that Public Interest Registry is a mission driven non-profit registry and currently has no specific plans for any price changes for .ORG. Should there be a need for a sensible price increase at some point in the future, we will provide advanced notice to the public. The .ORG community is considered in every decision we make, and we are incredibly proud of the more than 15 years we have spent as a responsible steward of .ORG. PIR remains committed to acting in the best interest of the .ORG community for years to come.
> Public Interest Registry is a mission driven non-profit registry and currently has no specific plans for any price changes
This means nothing. It's like when you get the hiring paperwork and the HR person says regarding the non-compete: "oh, don't worry about it, it's not enforceable"...
They already raised prices higher than .COM. Trust us, it's fine isn't a defense. If it's not in writing, it doesn't matter. For an organization already making 30M profit on a monopoly that was gifted to them, and in a world where the registry providing actual services (afilias) has prices decreasing, there is essentially no way to ever 'need' to charge more. Only greed.
I don’t understand the comparison because non-compete agreements are unenforceable by law in California, which would explain an HR drone telling you so. As far as I know, there’s no law preventing the Public Interest Registry from raising prices.
I'm slowly starting to suspect that maybe having human-readable names for domains is a mistake.
Partially because phishing domains is already kind of easy (the rapid increase in tlds isn't helping), partially because the race to grab and hold names has been having increasing negative effects, and partially because (aside from domains) many actual URLs are already impossible to remember. We're running into the same problem with SSL certificates -- the position of LetsEncrypt is now that they shouldn't be used for identity verification.
There would be some awful challenges if we got rid of the human-readable part of domains, but the benefits of moving to something like a unique hash or key instead:
- instantly getting a domain for anything and have it be permanent, without any renewals.
- getting rid of most name-squatting.
- being explicit and up-front with consumers about the dangers of phishing, and the need to build separate identity-verification infrastructure that couldn't be beaten with dumb attacks like the `rn m` trick.
I dunno. It could be a really bad, stupid idea, but I want to start thinking about if there are ways we could share domains in a hashed form on podcasts/posters/etc... that would mitigate some of the obvious downsides to having them be difficult to remember or type.
I know IPFS and DAT are using hashes for everything, but as far as I know they're both falling back on stuff like IPNS and human-readable aliases when URLs get shared, and to me those have the exact same downsides as the domain system we're already using today. I'm not necessarily advocating anything, it's just less obvious to me today that a naming system that uses actual words provides more benefits than downsides.
I want to be able to carry a domain between IP addresses.
But to rephrase your argument in a way that does feel more convincing to me, maybe there aren't enough downsides to ever be more important than this one feature, or I would be registering random strings for my domains already, just to get rid of the effort of finding new names for things I'm building.
>you would just be telling people IP addresses already.
That's doable in ipv4, probably with some rebasing: e.g. converting decimal to hex, 192.168.0.1 becomes c0.a8.00.01
IPv6 addresses, on the other hand, are unmanageable with bare human memory, but I quite like the idea of every person managing their own hosts file, listed with a mnemonic name for their favorite addresses.
> I'm slowly starting to suspect that maybe having human-readable names for domains is a mistake
I've been coming to the same conclusion, for different reasons.
I've been thinking of getting some meaningless domain name, like 5aeca67f937de276.net [1], and then using email addresses at that domain for the contact email or login email at as many places as possible.
The idea is that if I use any meaningful name, there is a chance that some company will come along that does business under the same name, and will dispute my use of the domain name. At best, that will be a hassle to prove I'm not just cybersquatting, and at worst I could lose the domain and have to change my email at dozens, or even hundreds, of places.
I'm probably safe on my current main domain, tzs.net, because I've had it for around 21 years [2], and every time someone has inquired about buying it from me, I've responded saying that although it does not have a large web presence and so may appear lightly used it is in fact used for a lot of non-public web stuff, and extensively used for email. I don't even ask what they are offering for it. I tell them it would simply be impractical for me to move to another domain, and so it is not for sale. This should make a reasonable case that I'm not cybersquatting.
[1] Randomly generated by taking 64 bits from /dev/urandom and printing it in hex. I was thinking of 128 bits, but an email address that is @5aeca67f937de2760159265d458ba3d0.net might be too long for some poorly designed login forms.
[2] The first owner was my employer at the time, which bought tzs.net, tzs.com, and tzs.org because my boss thought I might like them. When those expired a year later, they transferred to me whichever ones I wanted to keep. I kept tzs.net and the other two expired.
> I'm slowly starting to suspect that maybe having human-readable names for domains is a mistake.
Not sure given how successful busineses have been with their web identities how you can say that.
> There would be some awful challenges if we got rid of the human-readable part of domains but the benefits of moving to something like a unique hash or key instead
I don't get the point of making a statement like that. It's like saying 'get rid of cars and the benefits will be'.
You know it's a complete non starter because given how things are it can't happen in the short future. We can't even get rid of spam phone calls for god sake. That is almost simple by comparison to 'eliminating human readable parts of domains'
Sure, you can just go buy a certificate for an IP address. The Subject Alternative Name extension used to make X.509 certificates work on the Internet this century takes IP addresses (IPv4 or IPv6) just as happily as DNS names (including IDNs, written with A-labels) or email addresses. You will need to prove enduring control over the IP address, often by showing that one of the RIRs issued it to you as part of a block assignment.
Of course running an RIR isn't free, and so the RIRs charge fees to their members, Cloudflare will be paying APNIC (and probably all the other RIRs since they're a global company).
And we're straight back to the usual suspects insisting that surely they ought to be entitled to everything for free. How can it possibly cost money to blah blah blah. Basically all you need to watch out for with such people is to make sure you get paid up front, because given an opportunity to stiff you they won't even feel guilty.
Sure - but with most of the same caveats that apply to moving your own globally public IPv4 address around... ie, you need to register for an AS number, buy the IP space you want, and publish routes in the global internet routing table.
Its nowhere near as cheap as DNS and much more complicated (since you're concerned about things like how, physically, pulses on a wire/fiber will make it to the edge of your network.. you need to peer with one or more ISPs).
You could lease address space from an ISP and make all of that their problem, but then of course its not _your_ IP space. Think of it like the difference between being an internet user (leasing IP space) and a member of the internet (running your own network).
Since we're specifically talking about DNS in here though, I really don't think a stable IPv6 address would be a viable alternative to what we use DNS for.
The effect would be to give Google even more power. It wouldn't just be your older, less tech-savvy relative who now type "cnn" into the Google search bar every time they want to visit cnn.com.
Anecdotally, it's not just less tech-savvy people who do that. I do that today for most sites I visit that aren't bookmarked, because I don't trust myself to remember if domains are registered as `.org` or `.com`.
Of course, I use DuckDuckGo to do it instead of Google, and I also block ads because they're yet another area for phishing attacks. But look at HN for example -- I have HN bookmarked because I can't get myself to remember that it isn't `hackernews.com`. I have definitely used DuckDuckGo and Google in the past to find this website when I was on an unfamiliar computer.
The Google Ads phishing attacks are also an interesting point here -- they work. You can build a Google Ad for a product that points to a completely separate website, and you'll catch people. Arguably (probably) getting rid of readable names would make that problem worse, but it's not like the current situation is good. Domains are already hard to remember ("Does it have a dash in it? What's the TLD? Are the numbers spelled out?").
The question is whether it would even be possible at all to build a better system. I don't know.
There's nothing stopping any of us from using a sha-n hash or uuid as a domain name now. Would definitely make domain searches for new projects a hell of a lot easier.
In light of the prior article about ICANN as an unaccountable private company (1), this is a good time to encourage everyone to read Bruce Bueno de Mesquita's The Dictator's Handbook (2). This is a classic setup for dictatorship by a small cabal (the board): a vast, unempowered populace, a clear source of money (increasing domain fees), and a fairly small elite that needs to be compromised, particularly relative to the size of the unempowered populace.
If governments and corporations haven't already started buying influence, I'd be shocked.
> This is despite only six out of over 3,000 comments being in favor of removing price caps.
Oh.. okay. Seems totally fair. If ICANN et al. want to charge an arm and a leg from non-profits seeking a .org domain on a public utility, I guess we can say goodbye to the prestige generally associated with that extension.
"The good news is that Public Interest Registry’s management is competent and well-guided. They will likely wait a while before making any major changes to avoid comments of “we told you so”."
Well that's nice of them, so we get to pay crazy amounts in the near future instead of instantly. how generous.
Bets on how long? I reckon 6 months. And they'll use some excuse like "to prevent spam" or "infrastructure costs are going up" (despite them earning millions per year and having practically no expenses)
Related to discussion about domain industry in general, I stumbled on the weirdest business the other day trying to go to a website name and instead typing crun.com.
It leads to https://venture.com/domains/, which is... a startup that rents out high visibility domains to others, with discount plans available where the price increases exponentially with the assumption that your startup does as well.
One of those things where you're not sure if it's satire at first.
Interesting quote that I found from Venture's homepage:
> The problem with not having the .com of your name is that it signals weakness. Unless you’re so big that your reputation precedes you, a marginal domain suggests you’re a marginal company.
One of the article comments suggests antitrust action, so I looked up prior lawsuits against ICANN for abusing their monopoly. The only one I found shows it being settled, not dismissed. Maybe it’s time to start filing complaints with government agencies against ICANN.
Ever since icann lifted the floodgates on all the new gTLDs, it's been almost nothing but unmitigated mediocrity. Follow the money, look at how much a company like donuts pays to icann for the "application fee" for each individual gtld.
Giving .Amazon to the company and not the brazilian-peruvian group that wanted to run it was really a fine example of icann in the year 2019.
> Giving .Amazon to the company and not the brazilian-peruvian group that wanted to run it was really a fine example of icann in the year 2019.
Not to be that guy - but why should the brazilian-peruvian group have gotten it instead? If you said that the actual group of mythical woman should have gotten it I would say maybe you have a point, but then we would have to first figure out how mythical creatures can own things.
>Not to be that guy - but why should the brazilian-peruvian group have gotten it instead?
News flash: You're being that guy.
They have a far more legitimate claim because they administer the majority of the geological zone known as the Amazon Basin, and have since long before Amazon the company was a twinkle in Bezos' eye?
I mean... I'm hoping you were being tongue-in-cheek... Nowadays it seems to be getting more difficult to separate the jokers from those who just haven't quite thought through things long enough before posting.
The word Amazon is an English word from Latin from Greek. It goes WAY back before peruvian groups were calling the Amazon the Amazon.
Secondly, the idea that peruvian groups called the Río Marañón and Rio Solimões the Amazon before it was called the Amazon in english seems a bit unlikely.
Given the tech world seems to have centralized around English as the lingua franca as it were, I believe this argument can be safely dismissed.
Further, if they didn't want it, they were free to not contest it. They contested it. Given the circumstances, I see no leg to stand on to deny a more legitimate claim being held by Peruvians.
> Further, if they didn't want it, they were free to not contest it. They contested it. Given the circumstances, I see no leg to stand on to deny a more legitimate claim being held by Peruvians.
I'm not sure I see why someone contesting it makes them have a valid claim.
> They have a far more legitimate claim because they administer the majority of the geological zone known as the Amazon Basin, and have since long before Amazon the company was a twinkle in Bezos' eye?
> And this week, we got to see the end result of those negotiations. According to a letter [PDF] sent by the Amazon Cooperation Treaty Organization's (ACTO) – which has been in talks with the mega-corporation for more than a year - Amazon offered to:
it's been like this since the 90s though. Things like .CX, .TV etc were managed by small firms who bought the rights and thought they could make megabucks with it ...
those aren't gtlds, those are cctlds where the "ministry of communications" or equivalent in some tiny country has been sufficiently bribed by a bunch of domain registrar grifters.
Network Solutions also offers 20 year and 100 year terms. ICANN rules say 10 years is the max, so I'm not sure how this works. Does NS just deal with it 10 years at a time at the underlying registry, eating any price increases themselves?
20 years .org at NS is $13.99/year, which is close to the more reasonable registries, such as Namecheap. 100 years gets it to $9.99/year, which is pretty good--if you believe that NS will really eat any underlying price increases over that time (and, of course, you will actually be using the domain for most of that time). (Well...pretty good until you remember that NS charges another $10/month for WHOIS privacy, which is free at Namecheap [1]).
[1] ...and I would assume at other popular registries. I'm just using Namecheap for comparisons because that is where I now have my domains.
That's a brilliant business model. They get all the money up front, get to invest how they want, and if there is a price increase, it probably will be less than inflation, and almost certainly less than their investment returns on your upfront payment.
It occurs to me that another possibility is that the 10 year limit does not apply to Network Solutions. Network Solutions was a registrar for something close to a decade before ICANN was created. It's possible that there is some sort of grandfathering that lets them operate under pre-ICANN rules.
Contrast this with acquiring a business name through any Department of State/Division of Corporations.
I shouldn't have to name my company some contorted bastardization to successfully enter the market.