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.<p>Contrast this with acquiring a business name through any Department of State/Division of Corporations.<p>I shouldn't have to name my company some contorted bastardization to successfully enter the market.
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.<p>We need a real DNS system, one where an individual can request and have a domain for life and which is truly decentralized.<p>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.<p>Anyone knows of any working approach?
Press release from Public Interest Registry, which oversees .org and similar TLDs: <a href="https://pir.org/pir-welcomes-renewed-org-agreement/" rel="nofollow">https://pir.org/pir-welcomes-renewed-org-agreement/</a><p>> 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.<p>And PIR's May 1 open letter to the .org community, which has much the same message as Friday's press release: <a href="https://pir.org/an-open-letter-to-the-org-community/" rel="nofollow">https://pir.org/an-open-letter-to-the-org-community/</a>
I'm <i>slowly</i> starting to suspect that maybe having human-readable names for domains is a mistake.<p>Partially because phishing domains is already kind of easy (the rapid increase in tlds <i>isn't helping</i>), 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.<p>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:<p>- instantly getting a domain for anything and have it be permanent, without any renewals.<p>- getting rid of most name-squatting.<p>- 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.<p>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.<p>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.
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 <i>The Dictator's Handbook</i> (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.<p>If governments and corporations haven't already started buying influence, I'd be shocked.<p>(1) <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2015/sep/21/icann-internet-us-government" rel="nofollow">https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2015/sep/21/icann-int...</a><p>(2) <a href="https://www.amazon.com/Dictators-Handbook-Behavior-Almost-Politics/dp/1610391845" rel="nofollow">https://www.amazon.com/Dictators-Handbook-Behavior-Almost-Po...</a>
> This is despite only six out of over 3,000 comments being in favor of removing price caps.<p>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”."<p>Well that's nice of them, so we get to pay crazy amounts in the near future instead of instantly. how generous.
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.<p>It leads to <a href="https://venture.com/domains/" rel="nofollow">https://venture.com/domains/</a>, 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.<p>One of those things where you're not sure if it's satire at first.
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.<p>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.