> DNS costs money to use (which I argue is not suitable for all uses.)
This kind of thinking is a trap that I see many people fall into. Domains cost money because they have to cost money. Human-friendly names are a scarce resource (there can only be one google.com and one @johnsmith). They have value, and the market tends to reach equilibrium. If a scarce resource costs (or is given away for) less than some people are willing to pay for it, speculators will grab it and resell it for the "right" price. Free domains for everybody actually means free domains for an enterprising businessman who grabs all of them with a simple Python script in 24 hours, and then resells them for $10 a pop. We already see that with normal DNS, short and memorable domain names go for astronomical amounts, but because every registration costs money, registering more unusual domain names if you don't actually have a need for them is not a profitable strategy, and so good enough names can still be registered somewhat cheaply. You need to increase prices to make speculation unprofitable while still remaining affordable to end users. It's a balancing act.
If you don't create the barrier to entry yourself, the barrier to entry will be created for you, and not in a way you like or can control. Such a barrier doesn't have to be monetary, it can be (difficult) proof of work, centralized identity verification and abuse prevention policies, legal consequences for scalping, invitation / vouching requirements etc, but a barrier always exists, whether created by the system developers or the free market.
This only applies at large scales of course, if your system is used by 10 people and all of them trust each other, "grab any name you want for free" is totally fine.
Having a programmer understand the economic and societal background when they create a new project seems to be a bold assumption. Obviously tech can solve everything, right?
I'm still waiting for the OAuth-based online US government ID for all citizens that lets us sign up for utilities, apply for colleges and loans, set up bank accounts, etc. instead of entering social security numbers everywhere.
How could someone as lowly as a mere programmer possibly understand the complexity of how things cost money and their impact on participation? Sounds to me like I should have sought your esteemed council before making this project to save myself the embarrassment. In future I will make sure to consult you before I do something.
The reasons parent posted are just made up "facts" that fit and tell a story that sounds right. Assuming programmers, who tend to be on the more intelligent side, reject it because they don't understand faulty reasoning is a faulty assumption itself..
Comments like this are unhelpful and just read like an attempt to punch-down on someone. If you think that something doesn't make sense then you must be able to list and describe what's wrong. Or do you expect people to be able to read your mind when you post something like this? The vagueness makes it sound as if you have a point but if you do it's not included in your post.
Which just proves my point. The barrier to entry doesn't have to be monetary, a competent human being individually checking each application works just as well.
There's also the point about scale, if your network is small and you trust your users, which was the case on the old internet, you can get away with a system that assumes no speculators.
I know this is HN but not everything needs to be monetized. There is such a thing as doing something because you want to. People write open source software largely because they want to and if it helps them they might as well let others use it too. There's more than enough unused network resources on the Internet to make a free alternative to DNS. OpenNIC comes fairly close to this but still fails to provide a good registration system.
>enterprising businessman who grabs all of them
I'm mostly targeting short names that can be shared with people in place of IPs. So think about server lobbies where normally you might type in an IP to connect to a friends server. The current domain name system has popular TLDs but my design isn't based on fixed TLDs. The name can be anything and there's no 'most popular' TLD so name squatting isn't an issue.
It may be an issue if this were to emerge more for apps and websites though.
> I know this is HN but not everything needs to be monetized.
It's not whether something should be monetized, but rather about whether it inevitably will. It's not a question of "if", but "by whom", "when" and "how much". Either you do the monetizing, via crypto or otherwise, or you hide your head in the sand, pretend that the issue doesn't exist and let the scalpers get all the profits.
> Domains cost money because they have to cost money.
That's not entirely true. They cost money because they're market commodities and thus have market value. Making them cost non-trivial amounts of money to register is a way to de-incentivize scalping by reducing the profit margin but it's mostly done because it enables registries to pocket the premium that would otherwise go the the scalpers (aka "squatters").
Of course it would be entirely possible to devise a system that treats them less as a commodity or enforces usage-based rights but to do so in a less rigid and mindless way than "no activity in N cycles equals forfeiture" (like Twitter and Google have done or announced their intent to do before) is hard and doesn't play well with pretending to be a neutral actor enabling a free marketplace of ideas.
One big problem I see with this, is it sounds like you're proposing we dramatically expand the scope of registrar duties while also proposing we stop paying them.
Where are they going to get the money to fund their nuanced and mindful enforcement of usage based rights? Is a team of legal specialists going to review domain applications for less than $15/y?
It sounds like your concern is that private companies are making a lot of rent off public goods. I could have an incorrect understanding of this, but isn't it all run by ICANN at the end of the day? A solution might be to make sure the rent captured on domains goes back into funding public goods. Like a digital land value tax.
I'm not talking about changing anything. I'm saying the registrar system is set up this way. It's never easy to completely rearchitect a system once it is already in place and well-established. I'm simply arguing that the way it works isn't a law of nature but a consequence of the underlying ideology and economic system.
Sorry, I must have missed the part where you pointed out a glaring hole because all I read was an explanation of how it's hard to change things after the fact (which I agree with) and some gesturing at human nature (which is contextual, i.e. it's human nature to act a certain way within a given environment but that doesn't mean it's not also human nature to act differently within a different environment).
As others have pointed out, domain names didn't start out as a highly valued commodity. Arguably they only became that during the dot-com boom when domains functioned as brands. I'd even go as far as saying they largely lost most of their value from that time period in the Web 2.0 days when startups started slapping random syllables together and dropping letters and have instead become more of a speculative asset, especially with the flood of new TLDs nobody can keep up with.
In fact, there are market restrictions enforced by various registrars like requiring legal presence in a given country for ccTLDs or providing content in Catalano and/or information about Catalonian culture for dot-cat domains. Of course there are workarounds for most of these but as I said these are just bandaids bolted on after the fact, just like premium pricing tiers.
If we're going to discuss this, I'd like to keep things on point. My specific question was, how do you propose paying for this system of allocation when the entire premise is to eliminate non-trivial domain fees.
This kind of thinking is a trap that I see many people fall into. Domains cost money because they have to cost money. Human-friendly names are a scarce resource (there can only be one google.com and one @johnsmith). They have value, and the market tends to reach equilibrium. If a scarce resource costs (or is given away for) less than some people are willing to pay for it, speculators will grab it and resell it for the "right" price. Free domains for everybody actually means free domains for an enterprising businessman who grabs all of them with a simple Python script in 24 hours, and then resells them for $10 a pop. We already see that with normal DNS, short and memorable domain names go for astronomical amounts, but because every registration costs money, registering more unusual domain names if you don't actually have a need for them is not a profitable strategy, and so good enough names can still be registered somewhat cheaply. You need to increase prices to make speculation unprofitable while still remaining affordable to end users. It's a balancing act.
If you don't create the barrier to entry yourself, the barrier to entry will be created for you, and not in a way you like or can control. Such a barrier doesn't have to be monetary, it can be (difficult) proof of work, centralized identity verification and abuse prevention policies, legal consequences for scalping, invitation / vouching requirements etc, but a barrier always exists, whether created by the system developers or the free market.
This only applies at large scales of course, if your system is used by 10 people and all of them trust each other, "grab any name you want for free" is totally fine.