alt Hacker NewsIt's always struck me as odd that TLDs are not just, well, freely configurable? Domains have always been subject to so much artificial scarcity for seemingly no reason. Why can't a DNS resolver handle .whatever?
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This wouldn’t really reduce the scarcity though. Right now everyone wants a “.com”, because it’s the convention. If you could buy the TLD “widget” for the same price as “widget.com”, then you would just move up one level in the domain hierarchy and have the same scarcity? If anything, the fact that there are several legitimate TLD options reduces the scarcity a tiny bit?
As an aside (I’m also annoyed by domain squatters etc), it is a fascinating market study how domains are artificially scarce the way they are when everyone can easily and cheaply buy them. I am not sure there is any reasonable solution to it.
Maybe it's useful for ICANN to delegate management to different orgs (mostly corporations) so they don't have to control every single website on earth directly
I would actually prefer for the ICANN to have even less power and for the whole system to be even more distributed
What's odd is there seems to be no viable alternatives to DNS at all. Everybody just standardized on this ancient phone book technology managed by some rent seeking "assigned numbers" organization and now there is no escape from it.
The reason is money
It can. You just have to abandon ICANN's.
The social fabric of the system would fall apart if people could trivially buy top level domains. Even the not so trivial buying that ICANN began in 2015 in order to profiteer was a serious mistake (to everyone besides ICANN).
it would be a global first come first serve namespace. Everything conceivable would be registered. Only the diversity of TLDs and SLDs saves the current DNS from this. In fact ICANN's money-grubbing TLD spam actually improved this, since there are now far too many TLDs to squat them all.