> I mean isn't that essentially the deal you get when you're renting any property? This isn't a model of internet that's good for anyone except the rent-seeker

> I mean isn't that essentially the deal you get when you're renting any property? This isn't a model of internet that's good for anyone except the rent-seekers, and at this case the people who pay the cost are our most altruistic organizations. In a larger sense, homelessness, housing inequality, and the rent being too damn high show that this isn't even a good way to do housing. If we're going to use real estate as a descriptive model for the internet, we should look at both the positives and the negatives and realize that real estate has fundamental problems we would like to avoid in the internet. Just because a model exists doesn't mean it's a good model to emulate. If anything, I'd rather see DNS be free, with rules against domain squatting. The only reason I can see to associate a cost with registering a domain name is to prevent domain name squatting, and it's clear that cost is a larger barrier to good actors (actual domain users) than to bad actors (domain squatters).