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Comment by tremon | Hacker News Reader

On the other hand, I struggle to think of a reason how harm could come from delayed activation of a registered public name. Can you describe a use case that cannot be solved by opting for a subdomain of an already-existing domain?

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England have just scored the winning goal in the world cup and I want to celebrate by launching my personal tribute on Lionesses.rock

Why shouldn't that go live instantly?

A disgraced pop star has just been found guilty. I couldn't register Bob-The-Builders-Crimes.uk before the verdict and I want to get my story out now.

I've had a brilliant idea for an eCommerce website but it is 1705 on a Friday night and, because no one works weekends, I have to wait until next week before the domain is agreed.

I agree that there's no great harm in having to wait a day, or a week, for registration to complete. But in a world of instant gratification, it feels old fashioned.

>A disgraced pop star has just been found guilty. I couldn't register Bob-The-Builders-Crimes.uk before the verdict and I want to get my story out now.

More likely:

Some flavor of shit has hit the fan. I need to register some viable short and to the point domain names to get the word out faster than BigCo or the government and their army of lawyers can buy those domains.

Would we have stuff like DeFlock if there was an objection period?

What about if some advocacy firm was trying to create a website for people harmed by a drug. The drug company would just object to all their attempted registrations and bog them down.

A delay doesn’t even really hurt this use case. The first person to register the domain would still get it, 24 hours later, unless there’s an actual objection.

Who defines "actual objection"? The entrenched interests are really good at tilting such processes in their favor.

A delay wouldn't change that. You're talking about the difference of the site being up for a half day or not at all, which is admittedly infinity times longer, but not enough to make any sort of difference (as opposed to putting the anti-entrenched interests info up without its own domain name.)

I think the "actual objection" is the hardest part.

The UK Government might legitimately object to the registration of `dwpgov-uk-payments.pizza` but should they be allowed to object to `dwp-gov-uk-stole-my-payments.fart`?

One might be obviously dodgy, the other is someone ranting about their experience. Do you think Governments should be able to object to domains complaining about them?

I'm not entirely sure. But we have have mechanisms like Google Safe Browsing, and I can imagine that a similar mechanism could be used. Or there could even be a new classification in Safe Browsing and similar databases for newly registered domains that look like they are misleaing, and this could actually be fast enough if there was a 24-hour hold on new domains.

None of these require a domain to work. There’s plenty precedent of things taking off without having a domain, eg Wordle, all Neal.fun sites, Hacker News, and I’m probably forgetting a few obvious ones.

I know that “mystupidvibecodedidea.com” is all the rage but nobody cares if that’s instead on yourname.com/mystupidvibecoded idea except you.

Back in the day (~2003) it was popular to get a domain name for every project. Loads of people I knew where holding a domain name for every idea they had. I even had a few (~40). But in like 2008 I think I switched over to using just sub-domains of my primary. If anything took off I could then find and buy the cool name. And if it dies (likely outcome) I've saved $30.

My impression is that one of the social effects of domain names being cheap and easy to get (at least among many vaguely technologist-adjacent cohorts) is that failing to invest in a 2LD for a new thing winds up seen as tacky, sort of an “if you weren't willing to invest enough to put a cover on it then what does that mean for whether it's any good” thing (you could see it as a counterparty good-faith deposit versus attentional costs if you like). In some cases this goes down to the level of individual publications. Additionally the way social technology has wound up around URLs seems to mean that both longer URLs and artificially shortened ones wind up losing secondary reach in unpredictable ways. I'm not that fond of this trend but I can see ways it winds up making sense in context. I don't know how widespread it is.

OK, so I have a legitimate domain. I can add any subdomain I want without recourse.

projects.example.com or new.cool.thing.example.com

So nothing stops me from registering a legitimate domain, using it for a bit, then launching the subdomain `pay-your-tax.gov.uk.official.example.com`

It must be legit - it has the .gov.uk in it!

In the world of spammers with zero accountability, it seems needed.

... and nothing of value was lost

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