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Comment by robalfonso | Hacker News Reader

Quote>>>

They're half a dozen lines of text (counting glue records and DNSSEC anchors) in a database, it's OUTRAGEOUS we have to pay for that at all.

This is not what you are paying for. Every time this argument comes up it hides the real problem...what you are paying for is the legal wrangling, security overhead and general compliance that comes with the internet.

Phishing, trademarks, spam, business disputes,and valid legal requests will all still exist no matter who runs things. Those costs are what your domain fees really have to cover.

It’s been a very long time since domain costs were highly dependent on the technical requirements of the data they represent.

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> Phishing, trademarks, spam, business disputes,and valid legal requests will all still exist no matter who runs things.

Of this list, only "valid legal requests" is something a TLD should be concerned with in my opinion. And even that is questionable, given that law is often unjust, favoring the powerful and abusing the powerless.

We already have strong regulations holding internet hosts accountable for what they're hosting, and many countries (like France) have censorship at the DNS level. Isn't that more than enough to deal with abuse?

> It’s been a very long time since domain costs were highly dependent on the technical requirements of the data they represent.

Yes, and that's the problem. When you pay 1$/month for web hosting, you're not paying a thousand times the price because of hypothetical legal concerns. Why would it be different with DNS? Why is it normal that a line in a zone file on some TLDs costs more than an actual VM in a datacenter?!

TLD's have various compliance requirements around abuse, which does include the afore mentioned. There is significant volume related to this compliance as well as ensuring registrars maintain compliance. It's the nature of the existing arrangement so it's not hypothetical.

Of course the individual cost is low for a single item, however, businesses have never operated on that principle. They aggregate the profit and the risk across a pool, no surprise here.

> Of course the individual cost is low for a single item (...) They aggregate the profit and the risk across a pool

It's not the only way ever to deal with that. We could imagine a cross-TLD insurance which would take care of legal costs, for instance. Or have for-profit entities pay the current registration price (more?) so that others can have domain names for free. Or have a donation-based model with transparent accounting so people can see whether they need to donate more money. Or crowdfunding campaigns when a specific issue arises and introduces legal costs.

I'm not saying i know the best way, i'm just saying we know for a fact the current system is only making TLD execs pocket 6-digit salaries out of a public service, and that's a scandal. If at all, they should be paid the same salary as anyone else working for the TLD. Yes, the same as even the cleaners/cooks if such things apply. This way, they'll have incentives to either make things cheaper for the rest of us, or share some of the wealth they accumulate off our backs with less-privileged folks.

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