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Comment by jackblemming | Hacker News Reader

You think that fraud is just going to go away because .tk is gone?

probably not, but very little of value has been lost

I would disagree, I remember as a kid in the late 90s being able to host a website on one of the free hosting providers and then pairing it with a free domain name just made the whole thing that much more special. $10 or so a year for a paid domain name isn't a ton of money, but it can be for a kid with no credit cards and parents that aren't convinced as to why you "need" a domain name.

The problem is that "free for kids" is also "free for scammers" and it's hard to square that circle.

Would be really cool if public schools provided a free domain and basic hosting for any interested middle/high school student.

Good luck considering we can't even pay teachers properly.

Cost would be negligible compared to a teacher's salary.

(1 teacher / 20 students) * ($50k / teacher-yr) = $2500 per student per year to fund teacher salary.

Compare that to $40/yr domain+hosting, which maybe 10% of students will use. $4/student-yr will not be the diffence between paying teachers probably or not.

That budget only works if you don't care about content moderation or abuse management at all – or did you expect teachers to just do that on the side?

I don't think that would be a good idea. It would introduce an admin burden on the schools related to moderating/monitoring the sites. And they would more than likely overstep in one way or another, when enforcing their rules.

I was thinking state-administered. Public school enrollment would just be the precondition to access the program.

But sure, yeah, there'd be some admin time spent managing it. As with anything, there are plenty of reasons not to do it. It struck me as a low cost-to-impact ratio thing that could get kids into tech, but reasonable minds could disagree.

The only way it would work is if it was literally handled by the government, and the associated 1st amendment rules applied (so it wouldn't be moderated unless it was actually shut down by a court case).

It would result in rampant wildness and people complaining, but if you didn't do it that way the burden would be too high.

Another way of looking at this is that scammers can probably afford to spend $5-10 on a TLD since it's just a cost of doing "business" to them, but many kids can't.

I was very happy about free TLDs back in the day as a teenager, since I could just try things out before having to convince my parents to let me use their credit card to register a proper domain name.

It's infinitely easier to spend $0 vs $0.01 if you're trying to be anonymous online. The criminals can certainly afford it but that also almost certainly means interacting with financial systems that leave a paper trail.

I doubt that that's any kind of obstacle to criminals.

At a quick glance, many registrars and hosters seem to accept crypto, and anyone can buy prepaid Visa and Mastercard cards anonymously for cash for the ones that don't.

we're not in the 90s anymore. Many free subdomains options such as gitpages or full on free app (heroku) exists now.

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