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I'm not really well informed about the politics of DNS at the top, but I've always had the impression ICANN has been grossly negligent / corrupted over the last
by zanny 8y ago
I'm not really well informed about the politics of DNS at the top, but I've always had the impression ICANN has been grossly negligent / corrupted over the last twenty years.
At the end of the day there is profound capital interest in making name records unfair and noncompetitive in order to rent seek fortunes off the Internet and I see no indication ICANN is anything but compromised by those interests in the way they hand out TLDs and enable registrars to operate as for profit corporations. Nothing about a database translating human readable strings to IP addresses should be a damn profit center.
I'm surprised the EFF, FSF, etc haven't ever shown interest in replacing ICANN's registrar model with something that enables registration without squatting, doesn't let anyone rent seek a fortune off of naming things, or create profit incentives that leads to the mess where some things are named strangely because someone is trying to extort money for it.
There are some edge technologies like namecoin and IPNS that seem to be trying to approach this problem in novel ways but its a shame we don't have a fair consensus model on naming things that actually works.
- rafiki6 8y agoCouldn't agree more. Not sure why the task of operating DNS' isn't the domain of governments the world over. It's kind of like operating a post office. Post office's are the ones who have the routing information and capability to route physical messages and packages. They are still operated on a for profit model, but they are also generally very well regulated. Same thing should apply with registrars
- zanny 8y agoI believe that is how the country code TLDs do work, but most nations (who are given ownership of them) they just hire a corporation to sell domains and make rent seeking gross revenue off a few characters of a URL. But those are eclipsed by the generic TLDs where its just a happy accident registrars and rent seekers are making fortunes off of words with com or net at the end of them.
- ehnto 8y agoI am against privatisation of key infrastructure and I would certainly count the internet as key infrastructure. However I am not sure the government would be entirely benevolent. So I agree that some good regulations are probably a good start.
- BurningFrog 8y agoWhen you scan for uncorrupt institutions, how the hell do you end up on "governments the world over"?
- lukeify 8y agoBecause some of us don't believe governments are inherently evil?
- WillPostForFood 8y agoAlmost no one believes governments are inherently evil, but that doesn’t mean many, or most, aren’t corrupt. How many anarchists are there in your neighborhood?
- minikites 8y agoI've never understood why governments (or labor unions) default to "corrupt" and private firms default to "virtuous".
- cortesoft 8y agoI mean, lots of people think both are corrupt.
- prewett 8y agoIt seems to be that if you lean Republican, governments are corrupt and private firms virtuous because freedom and the magic of the Invisible Hand of free markets make private firms virtuous (individual choice) and governments corrupt (coercive force). If you lean Democrat, then governments are virtuous and private firms corrupt because the free market doesn't solve all the problems, and for those you need regulation (government: coercive force). In fact, the regulated free market leads huge wealth disparities, which leads to social problems, and since private firms that are seeking to maximize their wealth disparity, obviously they must be corrupt. Naturally, neither of these pictures is right, or rather, they are both partly right.
- 8y ago
- rafiki6 8y agoThe responses below are kind of funny. The government already runs key infrastructure. I'm not sure if the argument is government vs. Corp. Frankly governments are more likely to consider public interest than corps are. That's not to say that they always do, but corps almost never do. This is why government sells things like spectrum or land for railways if they don't own the rail themselves. They also own things like roads. It's important to realise that there is no incorruptible institution in the world. Maybe domain name management is actually a great use case for blockchain or some other truly democratic distributed accounting/ledger system.
- forgottenpass 8y ago>It's kind of like operating a post office. The reason that there is a namespace problem in the first place is that most people don't want the kind of domain name that post office numbering would give them. When the internet was newer, my school email address was @schooldistrict.k12.state.ca.us, by the time I graduated highschool it was @schoolname.org.
- Gustomaximus 8y agoI've always wondered if they could somehow price domains logorithmically. First domain is cheap and then cost goes up x% per additional domain. Stop people holding swaths of domains at each gTLD level. Would people end up just having a bunch of shelf corps...
- DKnoll 8y agoIt costs $360 to incorporate at minimum, at least here in Ontario, so that would still be substantially more expensive than it is currently. The CIRA (Canadian Internet Registration Authority) at least, probably others, used to give away domains for free but stopped the practise due to squatting.
- TrickyRick 8y agoThere are plenty of countries where it's cheaper though.
- Tepix 8y agoBut one company can deal with multiple domains.
- teddyh 8y ago> Would people end up just having a bunch of shelf corps... Yes. They already do something similar when registering in a ccTLD which requires a “local presence” in that country – they simply pay somebody in that country to be a proxy.
- walrus01 8y agoOne need only look at the $185,000 "application fees" paid to icann by companies like donuts, and play follow the money, for all these new insipid GTLDs.
- degenerate 8y agoI'm still waiting for ICANN to approve some scammer that realizes he can buy the rights to the .conn TLD and phish the entire world with apple.conn / google.conn etc... talk about juicy ROI
- tqkxzugoaupvwqr 8y agoHmm, .corn would be even better. With modified kerning, links will look like .com.
- degenerate 8y agoYes that would be even more devious!
- AmericanChopper 8y agoI agree that ICANN is either corrupt or useless, but you still have the problem of scarcity to address. Domain names are important assets for businesses, and ‘good’ ones are going to be in high demand. Squatters add essentially no value to the system, but there’s no fair way to determine who gets a domain name that multiple parties want, aside from letting the market take care of it. This is a flaw in the system itself, but I can’t see many realistic ways of addressing it.
- ndnxhs 8y agoDomains already require your real life info. Just give something like 5 free domain names per person and tie it to their ID. There exists more than enough useful domains for everyone its just most go unused
- AmericanChopper 8y agoThat’s a completely impractical suggestion, that ignores how domain names are actually used. Domain names are used primarily by organisations, not individuals. But even for individuals this wouldn’t work. Vanity domains are still going to be scarce, and the names in demand for organisations are still going to be scarce. And why should there be any limit on the number of domains you can buy? What if I have 6 projects I want to host? What if I own a company and want to buy my name in multiple TLDs to prevent phishing? What if I want to have a different domain for my dev/test/sandbox/prod environments? “For every complex problem, there is an answer that is clear, simple, and wrong.”
- ndnxhs 8y agoBusinesses can still buy all the domain names they want just like they can now. The owner of a small business just needs 1 domain for their cafe and maybe one more for personal email.
- AmericanChopper 8y agoYou know these speculators are businesses right? What problem do you think your suggestion is solving?
- ndnxhs 8y agoI wish there was a system where each individual is entitled to a few domain names for no cost on their local cctld. That way real users get the domains they want and hoarders have to pay.
- S_A_P 8y agoWait, what??? Think really long and hard about how that would play out. This is a scarce resource, that like many digital items feels cheaper than it really is. I personally think that domain registration should cost more. That would a) stop casual speculation and b ) make those speculators feel like holding on to a domain less appealing. I own way more domain names than I have time to work on and until there is any reason to stop renewing them probably won’t.
- strken 8y agoPerhaps you could have a ratcheting cost, where the first 100 domains are $10 each, the next 100 are $20 each, and so on up to some upper bound, with provisions for shell companies that solely register domains.
- shakna 8y agoThat is part of how FreeNom [0] (ex dot.tk) advertise themselves. They have had serious issues in the past, and most of the domains of the countries involved are automatically treated like spam by a lot of internet services. > With the free domain model, partner countries can offer their local internet population the tools to get online quickly and at no cost. This proven and innovative model dramatically encourages the creation of local content and stimulates the registrar. This started out with Tokelau, a New Zealand territory, IIRC. I love the idea, but it seems the commercial world hates it. [0] https://www.freenom.com https://www.freenom.com
- scrollaway 8y agoSeveral ISPs do that actually. Not many but I've seen this a few times.
- markdown 8y agoOne of the worst squatters right now is www.hugedomains.com They buy up expired domains and immediately put them up for sale for $XXXX At that price, they can sit on the domains for decades and still make a profit when it's sold. Eg: https://www.hugedomains.com/domain_search.cfm?domain_name=css https://www.hugedomains.com/domain_search.cfm?domain_name=cs...
- ViViDboarder 8y agoThis is something I’m terrified of. I feel like I can never let a domain that I may want to use again in the future ever laps or someone will buy it and extort some exorbitant price from me to get it back.
- boyband6666 8y agoThey really are the worst. I got in touch with them to buy one, as unfortunately they had one that I needed for business (speculatively registered on their part). When I asked how much they wanted for it, they then doubled the price to $10000 (9 characters, not commonly used words). In the end I went with an alternative TLD. it isn't as good, and I'd have been willing to pay a decent amount for the one I wanted (even their original price, reluctantly), but I refused on principle when they got silly. They are just parasites.
- troquerre 8y agoThere are grassroots efforts to make DNS more fair springing up. Handshake.org is one example (with backing from A16Z, Sequoia, and SV Angel) — they're aiming to decentralize the root zone and allow anyone to own their own TLD. Disclaimer: I'm building a registrar for Handshake called namebase.io.
- austincheney 8y agoThis is mathematically simple to fix. Charge US$0.50 per month ($6 per year) for every domain reservation regardless of who is reserving. The fee must be charged per month and not per year, which intentionally results in greater maintenance overhead. I don't care if you are a registrar, government, charity, school, or whatever. US$0.50 each and every month for each and every name. Registrars can slap whatever markup they want on top of that. The free market will lower the price where competition matters and raise the price where demand is huge for a specified name. If you are holding 100,000 domain names and doing nothing but serving ads on them you better hope you are generating greater than $800,000 (conservative estimate) in advertising revenue off those domains. That number is the cost of reserving the name plus your business expenses to maintain those names and the associated advertising content. I find this scenario to not likely to be profitable. Unfortunately this solution won't work in reality, because everybody will bitch about their business interests and self-justifying political reasons.
- dtech 8y agomost registrars already charge a yearly fee per domain. Does ICANN not already charge a fee per domain?
- austincheney 8y agoICANN charges a ridiculously low maintenance fee to the registrars at something like $0.18 per domain per year. https://www.google.com/search?client=firefox-b-1-ab&q=icann+domain+fee https://www.google.com/search?client=firefox-b-1-ab&q=icann+...
- dorgo 8y agoAdvertisers often pay 3€ - 5€ to google for one click. If your 100,000 domains are not complete garbage, you should easily get a million out of it.
- Double_a_92 8y ago> 3€ - 5€ Isn't that for 1000 clicks?