cross-posted from: https://hilariouschaos.com/post/1077711
Edit: https://chapo.chat/ for the live action drama, sort by new posts.
Edit edit: https://chapo.chat/post/4468531
Welp
this post was submitted on 11 Feb 2025
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You don't have to pay anything to have your own identity.
If you want someone else's servers to replicate a piece of information for you, and you want them to take responsibility for administrative issues like figuring out whether you still want it next year or what to do if you're doing something illegal, you may have to pay anywhere from $5 a year to $30 a year for the privilege depending on a couple of factors. Given how massively inflated the price of registering a domain could be, if the type of ghouls who like to get their hands on things like this were able to get their hands on it, I'm inclined to call that success. About 99% of internet users will never need to know or care about DNS, and they can still have their identity without having to pay $30 a year.
I'm pretty sure the price of domains has actually been going down over time, and they've introduced a bunch of new TLDs and new types of entries in the records in response to pretty much the only significant problems that the 40-year-old system has ever had during its history. Like I said, I'd call that success.
I would like none of these services. I would simply like my domain name to be mapped to my server's IP. I don't want to have to pay a registrar, I would like to submit my domains to registers directly. There is a business layer of middle-men who do not need to exist.
ICANN is in the business of running the Internet, not fielding tech support calls from Jones' BBQ and Foot Massage. I'm fine with this layer of separation. Hell, if it was one massive company controlling all the domains worldwide, wouldn't that monopoly be an order of magnitude worse?
I don't mean interacting directly with ICANN. I mean directly interacting with registries, like Verisign.
They control the .com top level domain. They do not interact with consumers, and require you to use a third-layer of registrars to interface with them.
ICANN shouldn't get into the direct-to-consumer business, that is true and not the issue I am speaking about.
You're in luck! You can do this! You can become your own registrar. Cut out the middle man! You only have to pay $4000/year to talk directly to ICANN.
I mean, it is kind of getting that way. The proliferation of some domains that are more expensive than others could potentially be a sign of the whole thing slowly collapsing into costing $10/month or maybe orders of magnitude more, if you are a big company with fat pockets that can be rummaged through, like everything else is nowadays. My point is that the price is $12 per year specifically because those forces have been kept at bay, at least partially, which means the system is an ever-more-incongruous-with-every-passing-year vestige of the decent way that the internet used to be. And also, yes, there’s an increasing cacophony of services which are trying to charge you more than it should cost, hoping that you’ll think $50/year is reasonable and just pay it not knowing any better.
If you think it is sustainable to be able to submit registrations completely for free, though, you are welcome to provide that service to the world under some subdomain, and do a vital service to remove the evil of which you speak. Just register dns.free or whatever, and set up a thing where people can register mysite.dns.free or whatever subdomain they want, and then they can all have it for free. You can be the change. I suspect that if you undertook this mission, it would quickly become apparent to you why the system as a whole still needs to charge a tiny nominal fee in exchange for doing it.
Running the central DNS servers is so cheap that it makes no sense to try to charge for it. Doing the administrative work of keeping track of hundreds of millions of people who all want to register some appellation for themselves, and keeping track of all the changes thereto, is significant, which is why that side of the operation wants to charge you a few bucks a year for it.