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.
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.
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!
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.
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.
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.
> 8,000,000,000 humans
Alright everyone choose your opponent.
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.
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?
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
What happens if you lose that private key?
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.
If you own a domain, when your IP address changes it's generally a short migration.
- 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.
[1] https://media.ccc.de/v/2025-170-how-to-become-your-own-isp
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 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.
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.
Same with the https://small-tech.org link in the footer, why is that not an IP address link?
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.
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
[1] https://media.ccc.de/v/2025-170-how-to-become-your-own-isp
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...
twiss•7h ago
roywiggins•6h ago
espadrine•5h ago
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.
ricardo81•5h ago
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...