Comment by susam | Hacker News Reader

Comment by susam | Hacker News Reader

> 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 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.

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.

> 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.

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

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 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.

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