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Comment by greyface- | Hacker News Reader

http://www.links.net/webpub/domains.html says:

> It used to be free, now you have to pay $50 a year for the priviledge ofyour own address. Some people aren't standing for it, Refuse to Pay!.

The "Refuse to Pay!" link 404s, but is present in the Wayback Machine, and is an amusing read:

https://web.archive.org/web/19970606222403/www.alaska.net/~n...

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Imagine if registration had stayed free, there'd be no domain squatters, and that cool idea you had that only works if the domain is available would be possible!

If registration were free one guy would write a script to register every possible domain and no one would be able to get one without buying it off of him.

Easy to handle, just use the rules of that time — single domain for single IP. Not applicable to v6 and dyndnses, but something like this can solve it.

That seems like it would only further incentivize a problem we have today - wastefully holding a bunch of IPV4 addresses that you have no need for.

IMO the .com domain name fees are… acceptable. It’s similar to how we deal with scarce resources in almost every other domain. The only real improvement I can think of would be some sort of LVT-like-system where high-value domains (dictionary words, short domains) would cost more than low-value ones (robertospizzaottawa.com) to discourage camping.

If to speak about free domains, this problem can be an advantage.

That was not a hard and fast “rule” in 1994 in that you could host multiple domains on a single IP for email purposes. You could also point an arbitrary number of domains/host records to an http server with a single IP, you just couldn’t serve differentiated content per domain/host record.

Ok, then we would have to buy an IP address instead of a DNS address. How is that better?

Blackrock and Bloomberg would be squatting on the entire web, and we'd be back to using BBS / newsgroups to get away from them.

I mean we currently have Google and Facebook clawing the entire web, and plenty of us are using BBSes and newsgroups to get away from them.

Can't say you're wrong. As with any giant corporation, their guilt is presumed, it's just a consideration of degrees.

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