> Pay your fee once, and the domain stays active forever.
Beyond domain squatters, who would benefit from that?
Beyond domain squatters, who would benefit from that?
It means I could maybe publish my memoirs and family tree and have it still available in 500 years.
It also makes web domains like other property - you don't purchase a nice watch and then expect it to be reassigned to someone else if you don't pay your annual watch renewals.
Your property is both relatively scarce, limited, and requires significant service compared to random domains on some random tld.
Everyone would love to have a three- or four-letter domain but, like land, they're not making new characters for the ASCII alphabet.
This usecase makes no sense at all. If you plan to have a server going after you're no longer able to maintain a server, your only option is to pay someone to manage your infrastructure and/or services. Once you're paying some company to manage your infrastructures, managing domains becomes a subitem in your invoice.
To get around the problem of a numeric TLD, I suggest using Roman numerals (and telling Myanmar it has to go back to using .bu).
While I'm sure this would be great for your ego, it makes no actual sense. Very few documents from so long ago are available, not because it was somehow miraculously impossible to preserve documents but because overwhelmingly people don't give a shit.
You are demanding that future people should give a shit, and they aren't going to oblige.
I for one love to read historical documents and primary sources. I'm glad some people in ancient times had the foresight to record a bit of their lives in the hope that future generations might find it interesting.
You always have the option of committing your memoirs to stone, absorbing the long-term cost up front yourself.
I’ve always found personal accounts and memoirs to be the best kind of writing. You get to read beneath the surface between the person they were, the person they wanted to be and the worldly circumstances they found themselves in.
Of course, go far back enough (I'm not sure if 500 years is enough) and mathematically speaking, the number of your ancestors will exceed the population of the world, which shows some other issues that you run into.
That said, this is not something I expect to happen in the regular Web, this seems to be a job for IPFS, blockchain or whatever. With plain HTTP, even if you have your forever domain, you'd still have the issue that the webserver it is pointing to can change, break or just disappear.
What's the benefit of a UUID over a raw IP address?
Not a technical requirement. Subject alternative name (SAN) certificates support IP addresses.
Unlike the Common Name, which is arbitrary human text (so e.g. " oops.example" is a valid name despite that space at the start, as are "c-programming.example\0\0\0" and "Ł0Ł.example") the SANs are defined so that it's harder to screw up and a machine can reliably just bit-for-bit compare the data. There are two main kinds: IpAddress SANs are defined for the IPv4 or IPv6 address just as bits, you can't express 200.300.400.500 as an IpAddress, whereas that's a (stupid but) valid Common Name; DnsName SANs are defined using a restricted character set and as specifically the ASCII LDH DNS hostname subset, which makes it much less tempting to try to incorrectly write a Unicode name here, what's actually required is the ASCII LDH name, ie Punycode.
Registering a domain is not an issue to anyone.
Some domain name registrars even offer multi-year subscription plans for those who don't want to bother with the 5minute work it takes to extend a subscription, and send out warnings months in advance to renew subscriptions.
I expect all of them, and I'd be very surprised if any domain name registrar didn't offered this feature.
For example, both Namecheap and GoDaddy allow customers to extend domain registrations up to 10 years in one go.
Network Solutions does offer a 100 year plan (and used to offer a 1000 year plan, but I just checked and that one is gone) but the way the implement is by registering for 10 years and then every year for the next 90 years adding a year.
You only really have the domain registered for 10 years, and you are betting the Network Solutions will still be around for 90 more years, and Network Solutions is betting that the price they have to pay for domains in that TLD will not have gone up so much that the total cost of all those extensions is more than what they earned by having your initial large [1] upfront payment invested for 100 years.
My recommendation: register your domain for 10 years. Don't turn on auto-renewal. Add an annual "Check my domain registration" item to your calendar. When that items come up each year either (1) add another year to your domain, or (2) check to see if it is near expiration and add years.
[1] $1600 for 100 years of a random .com.
Do you remember how much the 1000 year plan costed?