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Web Numbers

ar.al

35 pointssurprisetalk52 comments

> Domain names are tiny little rows in a database. They cost next-to-nothing to set up and maintain. There’s absolutely no reason why they couldn’t be a public good, paid for from the public purse.

I don’t mind paying for the domain name so much but I do mind the fact that even after paying for the domain name, there is no guarantee of having full control over the domain name. I do mind that even after spending money year after year, we are only renting a domain name, with the possibility of the domain name being taken away from us anytime!

I used to be a big proponent of hosting your email address at your own domain name. But then I had a very unpleasant experience of losing my domain name several years ago, for no fault of mine, due to anti-malware operations completely unrelated to my website. After that incident, I am not so sure!

I have written more about that incident here:

https://susam.net/sinkholed.html

I wish the mainstream World Wide Web were built around the concept of owning a domain name where we could prove our ownership using a private key.

I would honestly love to see government involvement in assigning public usage domain names. Phone numbers are much more limited than the domain space, but those too are really in the domain of "public good". So much infrastructure depends on reliable and stable phone numbers and email addresses.

> I would honestly love to see government involvement

Is not a phrase you should use lightly... government involvement in anything is rife for mismanagement. At its reduction, a domain name is an agreement between people to use X address for Y purpose. What would this power even mean?

Gives me a .person.gov domain for free, would be a good example.

Agreement between what people exactly? The domain name system is definitionally hierarchical: ICANN, TLDs, registrars, customers. Nobody is "arranging" anything, it's a top-down system.

The entire internet was built on public funds. The very reason why Verisign has exclusive control over .com and .net is a 1993 contract [1] with the National Science Foundation (or rather InterNIC [2], the successor of Defense Data Network NIC and predecessor of ICANN). They gave them this monopoly on the condition they pay 30% into a public fund, but the court ruled it an illegal tax.

Do they add any extra value, aside from hijacking DNS with their ad pages [0]? Do they have any meaningful competitors? Can you make your own TLD and enter this market? What would be different if ICANN managed domain registrations itself, without the intermediary, short of having more checks and balances stopping them from milking their customers dry? Your government didn't need to sell all public roads to a monopoly to figure out how to tax them.

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/InterNIC

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Network_Solutions

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Site_Finder

IANA is basically the US gov. All RIRs are also mostly governmental controlled.

Yea, but I mean like a .gov registrar to assign a single domain per SSN or something like that.

How about Ethereum Name Service (ENS)?

they're just as supported as jpegxl. oh, and you need to pay rent for them as well, even though their costs are even smaller.

ENS is still a rented domain, as far as you will lose access without recurring payments. In this case it's rented out by a network of nodes following a set of rules, instead of a single entity.

Why should you not have to pay to rent the use of a public good?

> prove our ownership using a private key.

What happens if you lose that private key?

A proper implementation would probably use a quorum of validators to allow for key management updates. These are solved problems.

There's a kind of "freedom is slavery" or "free as in beer vs free as in speech" mechanic involved with self-hosting. At the end of the day people really appreciate Facebook being free of charge and seem to feel really resentful that they might spend $5-$10 a year to maintain a domain.

I wholeheartedly agree. Bluesky had an interesting idea for identification using a domain you control to verify your account by adding a TXT DNS record for _atproto.

The problem is that it’s only a rented domain and thus a rented username. My DNS provider Porkbun offered a 5 year deal, but I would pay for much longer if I could.

The article is conveniently ignoring that getting your own IP block ranges from practically impossible (ipv4) to very involved (ipv6). And then you also need to figure out way to route traffic for that IP block; not all ISPs and hosting providers are willing to offer BGP sessions and whatnot. In any case it will be orders of magnitude more expensive than basic domain name and DNS hosting.

Yea. While owning a domain record isn't bulletproof, owning an IP address AFAIK is much more complex and expensive.

If you own a domain, when your IP address changes it's generally a short migration.

In the spirit of domains as a public good, mentioned in the article, couldn’t some organization procure a block of IPv6 IPs to distribute them and handle those hoops for everyone?

Some organization like RIPE or ARIN? Both which are non-profits and whose main activity is to distribute IP (and AS) numbers

I briefly looked at ARIN’s requirements before posting. I can’t just go request a single address, as I don’t think I meet any of these conditions.

- Have an IPv4 assignment from ARIN or one of its predecessors

- Intend to immediately be IPv6 multi-homed

- Have 13 end sites (offices, data centers, etc.) within one year

- Use 2,000 IPv6 addresses within one year

- Use 200 /64 subnets within one year

That’s what I was thinking an intermediary would be needed, unless they change their policies.

You need very different hard- and software for that. How to become your own ISP[1] is a nice talk about that.

[1] https://media.ccc.de/v/2025-170-how-to-become-your-own-isp

Is it easy/cheap to get a stable IP address? I would worry that if I just get any cheap VPS host, they might switch the IP address at any point, but I'm not sure how true that actually is.

And can you keep an IP address when switching providers? pretty much no, right?

Easy yes. Even VPS providers need to maintain the IP, since your DNS typically points to that IP. You can also typically move the IP to another machine from the same provider.

But as a resut, VPS often have a different price for public IPs compared to private IPs. For instance, it costs €0.004/h per IP at Scaleway.

I've used dozens of VPS providers in the past, albeit 'low end' in this instance- they constantly change IP addresses because they're renting them, buying them, etc.

For IPv4 definitely a problem.

I maybe used around 100 VPS hosts, less well known ones beyong DO etc. I'd get a dozen IP change notices a year.

Case in point: https://lowendtalk.com/discussion/160162/aio-ip-related-ipv4...

Paying $2-$10/year for a non-premium name (which will be drastically easier for your readers to use than any IP address) seems strictly better than arranging for a VPS static IP and chaining the identity of your site onto that VPS provider forever. I'm not sure this is what IP address certificates are really meant for.

I like the idea of popularizing using IP addresses for personal sites. I don't like trying to rebrand them Web Numbers, since imo it accomplishes nothing but being potentially confusing.

The bigger issue is hosting these small web sites for people who are used to using platforms which make connecting with other users much more seamless.

Most people want to allow comments and replies at least sometimes and that becomes a bigger headache when you host yourself.

I'd love to see Yarn become a solution for one step setup for people. I'd be even more excited if it's done in a way which is modular enough to allow "power users" to customize the framework, and potentially even bring their own framework and integrate it with features provided by Yarn. For example, maybe I want my framework to do the markdown->HTML and templating, but I want to use the comment system from Yarn.

>>I like the idea of popularizing using IP addresses for personal sites.

I like that too, but I would have to figure there is a big-web where they just don't care what you & I like to begin with :\

"Zero trust" DNS is steadily closing in on Windows, and that can be a pretty significant portion of web users.

https://4sysops.com/archives/windows-11-zero-trust-dns-ztdns...

>ZTDNS enforces strict controls by default, blocking all network connections unless the IP address is resolved through a Protective DNS. As a result, computers are unable to connect to destinations using IP addresses directly.

Last year it was guinea-pigged:

https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/blog/networkingblog/anno...

Now the zthelper Service has been implanted inside Win 11 from a recent package, it's dormant but if you want to try it out there are some recommendations, closely accompanied by troubleshooting approaches:

https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/blog/networkingblog/anno...

https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/blog/networkingblog/trou...

Looks like trouble is very much to be expected, and it could take a while for enterprise to accommodate it. But once that point is reached I imagine a remote trigger would be pulled and the blast radius would increase dramatically to include all Windows, sometime after Windows 10 is no longer with us. Mowing down small-webs as collateral damage.

My personal site's IP address has changed a ton over the last 5 years, but the domain name has been able to stay the same. So anyone who knows my site can always find it at the same place. That seems like a valuable service which I would like to keep.

Maybe what the author really wants is a cheap or free TLD that gives out uuids instead of human readable domain names? Or as they sort of touch on it could be subdomain based? I think having a layer between address and IP helps a lot vs using "raw" ip addresses...

IPv4 addresses are scarce. IPv6 addresses are not easy to remember, and not supported everywhere.

Has the author never heard of shared hosting providers? This already exists. Those tend to be extremely cheap, often cheaper than a VPS, and do not require remembering IPs. You share one IP with many people, and the domain name and the Host header lets the server tell the sites apart. A .com is under $10/month. There are/were also free domains.

Maybe author should lead by example and redirect requests from his premium short domain name hack to the IP address.

Same with the https://small-tech.org link in the footer, why is that not an IP address link?

Is it explained somewhere how links are supposed to work, especially if the intended use case is that you would just be using your own "address book"? I guess the address book is just a bookmark (and not like a /etc/hosts-type thing?), such that people aren't sharing links that don't work with each other. But the alternative is that they're sharing IP links, which, unless I am misunderstanding, means you probably do have to memorize IP addresses, and... all of them? Otherwise every link you post to your latest blog post or whatever just looks like a bunch of inscrutable (scary) numbers to people?

Not just scary because they are long numbers, but scary because they will take the user to some unknown place. If someone’s blog links to a domain I recognize, I feel safe clicking it. If a blog is linking to a random IP address, it then becomes a question of how much I trust the person behind the poster, and their ability to secure their server… and the security of my own browser.

It could work similar to @mention in social networks; you'd just need your user agent to display links to known numbers with the label from your address book. Which only works if you know that number already, but as the blog post mentions, that's also the case for telephone numbers and it doesn't bother anyone there. We're just used to never seeing IP addresses anymore.

But phone numbers are treated as relatively private, so they don't really face this problem. The few that aren't intended to be private, and meant to be broadcast, go out of their way to procure "memorable" phone numbers (such as, say, 1-800-333-4444 vs. 1-800-293-3841, the "vanity domains" of phone numbers, so that you can see it on a billboard and still remember it when you get home). You don't however normally broadcast individual people's phone numbers (like tweeting your friends number and saying "my buddy just said the funniest thing, call him here: 111-3333"). On the other hand, sharing is one of the primary purposes of for links and URLs. In this IP universe, the tweet is now "My buddy just wrote the best thing https://[2001:db8:1234:5678:9abc:def0:1234:5678]/blah". If this only looks reasonable to people that happen to have already visited this site and recorded it in their address book, then I'm worried it will quickly lose favor vs. "traditional domains". I will admit that I am not super familiar with the goals of the small web, and perhaps they want websites to behave more like IRC rooms, but I don't think sharing new content to a new audiences is against the the principles of the original web (given the emphasis on links). Again though, I am totally willing to believe that I am misunderstanding the goals here.

> Domain names are tiny little rows in a database

What about the infrastructure to maintain it? What about the dns traffic volume?

This feels very reductionist and probably more expensive then led to believe

Does it cost money? Sure! Does it cost $10/entry/year? Nope!

> 4,294,967,296 IPv4 addresses

> 8,000,000,000 humans

Alright everyone choose your opponent.

https://123.321.654.173/red vs https://123.321.654.173/blue.

In my opinion, it's much more complicated to register an IP with RIPE than registering any domain. Becoming a RIPE NCC member is hard.

Sure, you can work around it and route subnets or IPs from an existing IP or use NAT. But if I understand it correctly (please correct me if I'm wrong), you need a VPN or another way to tunnel it through the public network.

So you are in the same situation as with domains when you use an existing IP that someone else has registered.

If you have a lot of time, you can become your own ISP[1].

[1] https://media.ccc.de/v/2025-170-how-to-become-your-own-isp

Exciting language, a ctrl+f for 'phishing' returned nothing.

Then there's IPv4 exhaustion with that in hand:

I could see phishing being a problem for any notable website.

But having certs for IPs does seem like a nice option without paying for a domain.

I can't wait to buy my first hard copy IP-address book and look up numbers of friends & businesses in yellow pages with small letters

  The commercial domain name system is a perfect example of the type of artificial scarcity capitalism creates and exploits.
  Domain names are tiny little rows in a database. They cost next-to-nothing to set up and maintain. There’s absolutely no reason why they couldn’t be a public good, paid for from the public purse.
  And yet you pay (at times extortionate) amounts for them… why?
  Because capitalism.

Isn't this a bit simplistic? Domain names are a limited resource, so there has to be some way to regulate who can use which domains. What alternative method of regulation would you propose and why it's better?

Tbh it would be really cool for there to be a TLD dedicated to extremely cheap names, on the order of 0.1-10c. This could enable all kinds of fun use cases, including automated ones.

Lets say the domain is .anything, and your domain had to be at minimum 10 characters to limit the use of squatted names”. Then you could build a website for one purpose like “lets-go-get-pizza-tomorrow.anything” or whatever. Perhaps there could be a mandatory expiry or something.

That's a s(p/c)ammer's dream if there's a lesson to be learned from the.tk experience.

I think this should fall on governments to create such a system for their citizens. A cheap web.de or website.au, would be very practical.

Also I think national regulators would have more legroom to control such domains as they can exclude non-residents and avoid to deal with international rings.

On a personal level, I'd suggest buying a short domain (I own a couple of ab.xy ones) and use that as a personal tld of sorts.

And with Cloudflare, you don't even need to manually configure the DNS settings or let's encrypt.

Having a website up and running in 10 seconds without having to go through the process of registering a domain is such an amazing experience!

Currently, we're pretty limited on 5-character ab.xy domains, and they'll cost you over $1000 USD to register[1]. However, 6 and 7 character domains are available, and can indeed be really useful!

[1]: https://micro.domains

Worth noting TLDs have a reputation as well.

Having a cheap tld (e.g. .xyz, .pw, .icu) definitely lowers the odds of being able to send emails from your domain name, impairs search engine discovery, and has other similar effects.

xyz is a dollar to register. how much lower can you go?

Freenom used to do that. Free domains on .ml and bunch of other TLDs.

Unsurprisingly, with zero cost and zero registration information, they were very popular with spammers - https://krebsonsecurity.com/2023/05/phishing-domains-tanked-...

I used them for cool domain hacks and - while I'm sad those domains are gone - I'm happy the net is slightly safer.

There's an actually infinite amount of domain names, and if we could use any tld we want, there could be even more.

Using a million footnotes doesn't make you cooler, it shows that you can't write well.

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