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In other words, it would be enough for the chamber of commerce to offer a one-page-per-company index. Pre-populated automatically with all the legally binding contact information and offer a field or two where the company can put their Instagram-like profiles with lots of pictures. And allow people to comment on them.

One of the nice things in DACH (Germany, Austria and Switzerland) is the obligation to put an imprint on the website [0]. This is valid for every hosted site which runs commercially (even if it is a private blog displaying ads).

They must show a phone number, an email address which must be usable as a customer support email (even if it is just named info@...), physical address, who is in charge of the company and other things.

Whenever I try to find out whom a website offering some "new AI stuff" belongs to, I'm baffled to see that other countries don't require this.

[0] https://www.porsche.com/germany/legal-notice/

This is exactly the stuff that prevents innovation and drives entrepreneurs out of those economies. Physical address?!

Huh? Why would that be harmful at all??

Entrepreneurs hate responsibility

I imagine that most people hate random Internet crazies showing up at their homes.

When one starts in a garage, one doesn’t have an office yet.

It also defends against random internet crazies who are mad at you because you scammed them.

That's probably most of what it does, because how much attention of any sort does the average garage startup get?

> It also defends against random internet crazies who are mad at you because you scammed them.

Or think you scammed them! Crazies gonna crazy.

> how much attention of any sort does the average garage startup get?

I think that anyone who has dealt with the general public in any organisation (scouting, church, business, government) will tell you that a surprisingly large number of people (I have seen estimates as high as one in four!) are crazy to one degree or another.

I would very much rather not have my home address out there for every Tom, Dick & Harry who thinks that my software is making the aliens send radio transmissions to his teeth.

The same stuff prevents massive scams

It can be a letterbox. The point is that there needs to be a way to contact a company in such a way that message delivery is provable and legally binding.

AFAIK no universally adopted modern form of communication fulfills both.

How do the US solve this problem ?

I'm not so sure it can be a letterbox. When registering companies with the Handelsregister in Germany, I think there is a legal requirement to have a physical address. At least from my experience.

In the US, most (all?) states require a local registered agent with a non-PO box in the state. A lot of companies do good business as registered agents for out-of-state and foreign companies, where they file the paperwork and forward mail to the desired recipient.

It cannot be a letterbox. You must provide a real address that has capabilities to receive mail.

Luckily for a few euros per month you can rent quite nice addresses and the relative mail forwarding services (e.g., once a day, once a week, etc.)

You are right, that what I meant when I said letterbox.

I should have looked up the definition, before using the word.

In Australia, all companies must have a registered address, available on the register of companies (which isn't quite as open as I'd prefer, it isn't nearly as good as the UK's Companies House, for instance). This physical address must then have a plaque showing the registered company name roughly at the door.

In reality, just like in the Paradise Papers leaks etc, an individual accountant's office might have 4000 of these lined up next to their door.

Of course, for the vast majority of businesses, this is not much of a hurdle, and for most consumers it isn't all that helpful either, but end of the day, scammers are gonna scam, whatever the obstacles are. Even those that aren't outright scammers, will be paying accountants to have a plaque on their door to show that this is their "physical office" ...

Hopefully such efforts at least help courts assign some blame when the time comes.

Given how easy it is to do e.g. DMCA abuse, or claiming random videos on YouTube, I'd say they haven't solved it. There's even a lovely weird expression for it, fly-by-night companies.

Why would you need to hide your company if you are not running a scam?

maybe your company is just home.

When I see an imprint and see that it's a home address, I have no problems with that. It lets me know that this person is either just getting started or simply doesn't want to grow into a bigger company, probably because he/she has a real job, which are both great things, but if they scam me, I know where to contact them.

Why would I randomly show up at their house and ring their bell?

The “a sane person wouldn’t do this” argument is really not that good.

Neither is the "criminals might abuse it so we should make things worse for everyone else" argument.

Many companies start in the "garage" and if you have privacy concerns, you can't use your home address as company address. This requires you to rent a spot in a coworking that allows you to use their address as company address. Also, you need to get a second phone.

Too many small inconveniences for a small unprofitable startup that you need to worry about, instead of focusing on finding product market fit.

Why do you think the company needs its right to privacy but the customers that deal with that company don't need the right to know who they're dealing with ?

For your startup, aren't you setting up your DNS, webhosting, etc? aren't these small inconveniences that you're doing instead of "focusing on finding product market fit" ?

Each company, nay, each person has to do some amount of "paperwork" in order to create society that functions. Why should your startup admin be easier then my filling of personal taxes ?

One isn't a customer until they decided to get something from the company. But the website is available to everyone.

At least here in Germany, you shouldn't use your home address for your business at all, because of Tax obligations, at least when you are not renting.

Because if you want to move your business later, when it grows, the tax office will regard your home as part of the business. Things will get complicated that way.

Disagree with everything you said. These are all self-created non-issues.

Dont start a company if you are so poor you cant afford a postbox.

Unfortunately, in Germany, there is a legal requirement for a business to have a physical address when registering it with the commercial register.

How is that unfortunate? What would we gain from letting businesses opt out you being able to contact them?

It not only prevents innovation, but it also enables fake industries, such as companies that harass and "fine" you (not legally binding) for not having an imprint even when not required, or otherwise coming up with irrelevant "problems" with your imprint and reporting you to authorities.

Something where you're reachable for any legal purposes- in Germany this sadly remains a physical address.

There are various service which offer a 'virtual' address with digital forwarding of letters for less than 10Eur/Month, so it's not an insurmountable obstacle.

Out of all things that prevent innovation, this is probably the simplest with a "pay to fix it" solution. And the amount is not even that high.. we're talking about a few euros per month.

I have a mildly entertaining story for you! We have something just a little like this in Viet Nam.

It's designed as a public good that lets you look up businesses by their tax ID. It's mandatory for the company owner to put their phone number and address there. The address is periodically verified by an actual person. It gets scraped heavily, and inserted into a whole sub-genre of similar websites with mostly identical features but with faster and better search. I've even seen people print it out to make "phone books" that are sold at trade shows!

As you might expect, the resulting increase in (fairly sophisticated) scam calls makes me unlikely to pick up my phone. So I'm not actually reachable there with a call, but I might get a text! For my websites, registrar info for those ties in to the system above using digital signatures. So using only a domain name, you get the company license, a theoretically valid phone number, and a very probably correct address.

It's a mix of good and bad, but overall I really like the system. Looking up other companies before doing business with them has saved me and my colleagues from a number of bad deals, e.g. not the real company owner, or misrepresentation of the scope of their company license.

I think it's a terrible idea to put your entire business in the hands of big tech companies who will take it away at the first sight of something they don't like with zero (legal or otherwise) recourse, sometimes in an entirely automated manner. Like it or not, ICANN and the DNS system remains mostly-neutral as it should be (even though Tier1 ISPs can be easily pressured into dropping/blackholing by activists, and some of them are activists themselves).

> I think it's a terrible idea to put your entire business in the hands of big tech companies

You, me and entire HN is aware of this but who is going to educate millions of people who are already dependent on these services.

To be fair, we're not talking about millions here, it's genuinely billions.

Easily half of the world's population now have internet access, and vanishingly few ever manage to scale the walls of the beautiful gardens big companies graciously built for them.

Isn't that the idea behind an alternative to DNS? I think OP meant that we need a similar system based on clear rules and international cooperation for social media, in addition to host names.

> ICANN and the DNS system remains mostly-neutral as it should be

With emphasis on mostly. I believe most of the issues we have with DNS and name allocation could be solved if they were managed by an actual international non-profit organization. Alas, ICANN is an American for-profit company, whose corruption needs no more evidence.

If you don’t trust ICANN (and the generic top-level domains which they manage directly, like .com, .net, etc.), you might place more trust in the country code TLDs – which are independently managed by each country – where you may find a country with a more acceptable amount of corruption. Preferrably also in a country in which you have a legal presence.

AOL keywords? The benefit of DNS is that it's also sort of able to segment out globally, though that mostly works for smaller companies.

In many ways Google took over the role of DNS for non-technical people, but it's a little hard to advertise a specific search term. It is still possible to have a business without a domain name, but for e.g. WhatsApp, or Telegram, you're putting yourself into a garden with a wall high enough that even Google can't find you.

I have seem more and more companies simply advertise their Facebook or Instagram pages, but that sort of excludes a number of people from their business. Relying on WhatsApp would yield much the same problem.

On solution I could see, at least in some countries, is to have the government provide a "landing page" for each company when they register for their business licens. So you'd get tims-trash-removable.business.com when you register your company and you can then put in links to WhatsApp, Facebook, Instagram, email or a phone number.

Introducing something completely new would be extremely hard.

This is an interesting take on the current situation, and I definitely see it here in Portugal. Lots of businesses with signs with only a WhatsApp number and a QR code for payment (MBWay). This said, it seems like any system for discovery will have technical hurdles (a registration process, a way to apply updates, renewals, validation, etc). I agree that the landscape is changing, but it feels very challenging to establish an alternative to something like DNS without a lot of the same hurdles that come with it today. I would like to hear your perspective on what this would look like.

Social media platforms aren't the answer, they're the crutch. What you've described tells me it needs to be more straightforward to establish and grow your online presence on a foundation you control (or at least one where the owner has some true accountability to you).

But you still get the same problem, no? Limited good WhatsApp handles. Just domains are older, more common internationally and have had longer to be hoarded.

WhatsApp doesn't have handles. Only phone numbers. You print the phone number on a big sign on the front of your business, underneath the name of the business. If your phone number changes, you get a new sign or paint over it.

The argument that DNS is too hard doesn't really appeal to me. There are a billion and one WYSIWYG websites that let you register a domain and host some static site on it, all from one convenient web interface. I see loads of adverts all over the place for things like Squarespace and Wix. There's nothing hard to grasp about DNS if you offer it to users in an intuitive way. I imagine if Meta gave users a button that let them rent out a domain and have it redirect to their Facebook page, then many would take it up. There are a lot of people already using services like linktr.ee, so I can imagine a market for tying that page to a domain.

I think the biggest issue is that people have just gotten used to putting @MY_BUSINESS_NAME in their advertising and it's what most users know how to deal with. I reckon most users have never manually typed a URL into the address bar in their lives.

> These entrepreneurs don't care about domain ownership – an Instagram profile with substantial followers represents real business success to them.

Yes. Until they lose their SNS handle for whatever reason and then they find out what some of them actually do care.

As long as only a minority of businesses lose their access to WhatsApp, they'll just be outcompeted by ones who follow Facebook's law over India's law.

I doubt there's much need for long-term number stability in the type of business that prints a number on its sign out the front, anyway. If it does change, you could go back to the business and read the sign again.

> I doubt there's much need for long-term number stability in the type of busine

AGREE WITH NUANCE

Yep, any form of SNS is just a convenience for them and not the main method of interaction with clients. But for some of them it is the main method and for them losing the access could be quite devastating.

With the acknowledgment that it’s a controversial opinion, I think the most important ‘domain’ tied to our identity is our appearance, most importantly our face. I’ve been advocating for a time that we need to think about a ‘DNS’ that, in discrete, decentralized, decoupled steps, goes from the appearance of real-world things to meaning/language to links to digital things.

I’ve also written a little speculative fiction about what that might look like. https://open.substack.com/pub/noahnorman/p/all-the-kinds-of-...

As you get older, or if you get injured or disfigured, what happens? Does your "face card" get declined?

I envision this system as an evolving, fluid mapping of things to hashes, and hashes (or hash-space locations) to meaning, all controlled by users, institutions, experts, and authorities. So if you were to radically change appearance, it’d be down to those who have something to say about you to update where it’s pointed. You raise a good point in general, though, that all kinds of things can change appearance for all kinds of reasons, even to the point of being unrecognizable, and while I can’t think of any examples right now, I bet there are things that do that with some regularity. It’s down to the inputs to the system and their amalgamation into a hash to be robust to that within reason, and the rest of the way for the authors of data to take care of the rest, much in the same way everything written about the artist Prince still applies to him under his later name/symbol, whether it was updated or not. Same for brands that rebrand, countries that change hands, etc.

PKI infra and public trust CAs support this already via vetted identity certs. Nowadays these certs require picture ID from some determined compliant government org.

IE; your signing, email, encryption certificate public and private key are uniquely tied to your face, name, etc. You can do this privately. I can't think of a negative to this system in terms of risk, bloat, fatigue.

All this though assumes you support public certificate authorites and their practices. which is a bit of a walled garden on purpose, and tbh these types of certs aren't really needed right now.

That seems like a difficult problem to solve if "not having a real website" isn't stigmatized (it totally is as far as I'm concerned).

There are hosters that offer a domain + some kind of pre-baked website for like 2-3€ a month, but that's still not free (especially in India) and still not as easy as some social media page / account. Nevertheless, these offerings could be much better and cheaper, especially if there was a reasonably official looking TLD where it's dirt cheap to register a domain name. But is there a business model there? :/

That’s a great point.

Thinking of IPFS, maybe we shouldn’t refer to content by name and location at once.

Perhaps every business gets a UUID, and that’s the official online ID for that business. Link it to a name only for display (or a list of names, for multiple languages). Now there is the question of how to bind that to a location (IP) online as well as IRL. Maybe a map of business with their UUID maintained by governments based on the post office system to validate it IRL?

The issue with DNS isn't that it's too complex; from a purely technical standpoint, it's a fairly simple technology, no more complicated than email, or http. People have created all kinds of abstractions over technology to make it accessible over time. An instagram handle hides a mindbogglingly large amount of complexity going on underneath, and people find that simple enough.

It's the administrative part that makes it hard: The registration, the expiration, the distributed responsibility of needing a NIC, registrar, DNS operator, hosting platform, Certificate Authority—we're all used to the bullshit, but getting from "I'd like to present my business under this domain" to presenting your business under this domain requires way too much bureaucracy.

The whole process is still stuck in the 90ies: It shouldn't require more than picking a name and providing payment details to get running. Delegation of anything could happen easily via OAuth grants; TLS should just work, given ACME; all other details can be customised if necessary, but normal users should never have to bother with DNS records at all.

Maybe we should register social media handles into the DNS. Then you can advertise your domain and smoothly transition to them. Not exactly solving this, but handles are equally important than web server ip addressses or mail exchange ip addresses.

Bluesky is a great working example of this.

> The traditional website + DNS model is simply too complex for most people

You assume that business owners should do this themselves, but why? It's very cheap to get a contractor to make you a good website, so that's what business owners should do: contract somebody to do it. That's what business owners also do for signage, print promotion, accounting, machine maintenance, etc.

Most things except for breathing i too complex for most people, including for business owners. That's why there's business-to-business professional services.

This is such a weird take. This is not a problem per se on the technical level.

> Perhaps we need to rethink discoverability and identity on the internet in ways that are more intuitive for ordinary users

Isn't this why search engines became popular in the first place? Because they "solved" discoverability? And before Instagram and WhatsApp existed, they worked fine.

Isn't the reason businesses moved to Instagram and WhatsApp is because people moved to those services? and not the other way around.

I'm very interested to learn more about these WhatsApp only businesses, maybe it could be replicated in the West.

Are there any good resources/blogs/people/etc I should look at to learn more?

Well if you are a Jeremy Renner fan, there was just the app for you...

Given the recent US administration that‘s a bad idea.

With DNS you are somewhat independent, with social media you’re one executive order away from shutting down the whole economy

To all the folks saying this is a terrible idea and you shouldn't put your trust in big tech companies: you're absolutely right but also wrong.

This is just one of things that "works" and you can't really get around. Tangentially related but one of my friends started a photo booth rental business and was asking me about how to build his web presence. At first he suggested a website and I told him he should have a website but I also told him that an solid Instagram account (we are in the US) would work just as well.

Is it batshit crazy on a conceptual level to get into bed with a big tech company for your web presence? Yeah it absolutely is. But does it actually work and is the most likely way for you to drive sales? Yeah it absolutely is.