ICANN lifts the price cap on .org domains
domainnamewire.com
domainnamewire.com
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.
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 think most of my frustration is toward the domain squatting/reselling industry.
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?
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").
> 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.)
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Anyone knows of any working approach?
What's the catch?
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.
The yearly renewal fee is fixed, and is a standard transaction fee, not market based [0].
> 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
So ...
Handshake mitigates this by replacing the root zone entirely and, in addition, allowing existing stakeholders (.com, etc) to continue to own their existing assets.
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.
In the same way that nobody memorised Facebook's UUID of a person, they can just remember their name.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
It doesn't. It's decentralized, with lots of archivists, it's just not federated.
Personally I find tor to be most usable out of the approaches you listed, but obviously not for memorable names.
Nobody owns our language.
Martti Malmi, Satoshi's first Bitcoin contributor, solved this several years ago:
https://github.com/irislib/iris/blob/master/README.md#identi...
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.
> 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.
And PIR's May 1 open letter to the .org community, which has much the same message as Friday's press release: https://pir.org/an-open-letter-to-the-org-community/
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"...
The contract was written behind closed doors and approved exactly as proposed. The public comment period was a sham (no surprise).
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.
EDIT: Cloudflare pulls it off here so it's certainly possible. https://1.1.1.1
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.
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.
But there aren't enough downsides to ever be more important than this one feature, or you would just be telling people IP addresses already.
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.
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.
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.
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'
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.
If governments and corporations haven't already started buying influence, I'd be shocked.
(1) https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2015/sep/21/icann-int...
(2) https://www.amazon.com/Dictators-Handbook-Behavior-Almost-Po...
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.
Well that's nice of them, so we get to pay crazy amounts in the near future instead of instantly. how generous.
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.
> 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.
- PAUL GRAHAM, Y Combinator
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.
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.
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.
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.
https://www.theregister.co.uk/2018/10/25/amazon_domain_kindl...
> 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:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amazon_Cooperation_Treaty_Orga...
> Established 1995
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amazon_(company)
> July 5, 1994;
Got them beat by at least some months ...
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.
Although in that case, I bet they'd just give an excuse and offer a refund of the originally paid amount.
"ICANN's decision foreshadows that the organization will agree to .com price increases. Eventually, caps on .com domains could disappear."
So make of that what you will.
I bet the renewal price will now go up by 25% every year forever...