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Comment by 2pointsomone | Hacker News Reader

You know what an NTEN in partnership with a mega tech company (e.g. Google) should do? Buy a TLD that replaces .org and seamlessly transition (for free for 2 years or so) every .org owner. It's not impossible to imagine a mass exodus from .org that the search engines, browsers, and DNS providers quickly respond to.

And give ICANN the biggest sign of how this should never happen again.

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What about individuals like me? I'm not a non-profit. I'm a hobbyist who's been using a .org domain for 25 years, very nearly my entire adult life. My entire digital identity is tied up in it. I have hundreds of accounts and email addresses and subscriptions that I'd have to change if my mail domains suddenly became unaffordable. This is madness.

The dream of the Internet is dead. The web is being replaced with mobile apps and silos.

It's going against the grain now to do things on your own.

When did the internet become HTTP:80 and HTTPS:443

At least a decade ago.

>When did the internet become HTTP:80 and HTTPS:443

When you no longer needed ports 20, 25, 70, 110, 119 or 143.

Yes good point, that is why a TLD which recognizes you as a non-profit would not be a good idea. You would probably be just fine with .org regardless of whether a more apt TLD is going to be created.

> why a TLD which recognizes you as a non-profit would not be a good idea.

.org hasn't been restricted to non-profits since forever ago (even when it was the restriction wasn't enforced). It was, until very recently, a TLD supposedly run by a non-profit as part of the Internet infrastructure so that people would expect reasonable pricing, unlike others.

> You would probably be just fine with .org

Similar to gp I built my identity around an .org (though not as long). I certainly won't be fine if Ethos decides to jack the price of my domain to hundreds of dollars per year.

I after. How is it any way desirable if .org doesn’t actually represent non profits? If anyone can register a .org regardless of status then it might as well be sold to the highest bidder, as it was meaningless for a long time already.

Non-profit doesn't matter. The idea is that we create a replacement for .org and update all the DNS resolvers to prefer it for resolving .org lookups and only use PIR as a legacy fallback.

Many .org’s like the ACLU are mired in politics and thus have enemies.

Remember, not only could a new owner send e-mails posing as somedude@wellknown.org; even worse, they would be able to collect ^all^ the e-mail going to that domain.

I don’t believe for a moment that the ACLU, or Planned Parenthood, or any org of that scale could transition in two or even ten years.

If they have truly crazy plans for .org, one can drop a domain name and still block its assignment based on IP infringement..

The oddity here is that no matter what they do it makes no real difference to the kind of organization that regularly hires lawyers. I see this as more of an existential threat that every name connected with ICANN could end up in a free market pricing similar to rent.

Agree. Not sure what the TLD could be though. .ngo is a bit too specific. .non (for non-profit) is a possible option.

Both good ideas! I would have probably come up with .public or .world or something less representative of organization legal structures.

Isn't .www the obvious choice? ;)

Why do you need a special TLD for these organisations though? Having non-profit tax status tells me about zero about the organisation.

And .gov tells you nothing about a government organization, and .com tells you nothing about a commercial organization... Oh, wait.

Right, so why worry about it?

Why does everyone think .orgs are all non-profits?

My personal domain is .org and has been for 20+ years. I chose .org because .com and .net were taken.

I don’t ever recall anything where anyone even mentioned non-profits in relation to my .org registration.

I registered my personal domain in the summer of 1999. I vaguely remember that Network Solutions was the only option (you had to fax them) and for .org I would have needed to provide some additional justification. Maybe that changed after the monopoly was broken?

I registered my .org in 1999 via Network Solutions. I did not need to show any proof that I was a non-profit.

I did mine in 1999 also. I definitely did not have any proof of anything in 1999.

Com, org, gov, net, edu.

Peasants like us were never meant to have their own domain names.

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