ICANN's DNS servers is one of the only systems on the internet that requires people to continually pay money to have a name. X, YouTube, Facebook, Reddit, Twitch, etc all let you register a name for free and without submitting all of your personal information. The entire model here is outdated with what users want.
i’m glad it requires money. $1/month for a top level name isn’t much, and it means there are lots of good names available rather than all of them being grabbed by someone not interested in using them. when making a reddit account it’s actually pretty tricky to find a decent name that’a available
I think both models have a place. Sometimes I just really want a persistent identifier that I can take with me (unlike an IP) with minimal maintenance. Even if it is something unreadable like a UUID.
We should totally have a free .uuid TLD (which will predictably get blocked by 90% of networks... Although DoH would probably still work)
Twitch for example will allow you take over usernames of accounts that are unused. Also having a good name is less important than you think. Most people don't navigate by going to exact identifiers. They just type the name of the thing into a search and relevant results will be returned. Dead or useless results should not rank high.
So I should decide to be beholden to the whims of search engines and not have any other way to direct people to my content (besides QR codes maybe?)
I'll admit it works sometimes. "news.ycombinator.com" is not as memorable as "hackernews.com" would be. But I like being able to have my website be chadnauseam.com (the name was unavailable on reddit), I like that no one is going to decide I'm not using it enough and take it away from me, and $1/month is so trivial that I think it's worth the benefits.
Besides, if you don't care about having a short and memorable name people can type exactly, why not just host your site on the free subdomain vercel or heroku gives you?
...and to host associated services to resolve this name to an IP address, as well as administrative overhead
I'd rather not that my domain name is funded by ads and sponsorships, the way that "X, YouTube, Facebook, Reddit, Twitch, etc all" are (no love for open source or decentralised platforms btw? The more commercial the better, except when it costs you money?)
