101–110 of 410 posts
Remember when the .tk TLD became free 20 years ago ? Every hobbyist took one, then scammers followed, then Facebook and antiviruses started blocking it. I remember publishing a website for a class on my .tk domain, the teacher couldn't open it and I almost got a failing grade because of it.
Not enough allowance to fund a .com domain, had to use freenom / tk + cloudflare for my first years of self hosting
.me is cooler, but... That all the cool 2-letter TLDs are designated as country codes was an extraordinary mistake that will have unpredictable and devastating consequences long into the future.
However .me (https://namegulf.com/tld/cctld/me) is a ccTLD managed by the Government of Montenegro, they set their own rules
https://hccf.onmy.cloud/wp-content/uploads/2026/06/dot-self.... > Everyone entitled to a subdomain at no cost How are you going to pay for the (substantial) cost of running a TLD without registration fee revenue? Is this a loss leader for other services? Are you operating on a 100% donation model? > No parking, squatting, or reselling How do you plan to tell the difference between a parked/squatted domain and one in…
Is it actually a substantial expense? The TLD itself only has to publish the nameserver records, which generally have a TTL of about a day. A DNS response is a few hundred bytes. Big DNS providers like Google and Cloudflare would make requests for every actively used domain every day, but then cache them. Smaller providers wouldn't cache as well but also wouldn't each request every domain every day. For e.g. a million personal domains, ballpark estimate is somewhere in the few TB a month of traffic. Maybe a little over personal hobby project money but definitely not outrageous for a small non-profit organization.
> How do you plan to tell the difference between a parked/squatted domain and one in legitimate use but offering no public-facing services?
This is the easy one. Squatters buy domains because they want to sell them. To sell them they have to make it publicly known to prospective buyers that the domain is available for sale. So then if anyone lists the domain for sale anywhere, you make them prove that they own it (which any actual buyer would also have to do in order to not get scammed) and when they do the domain is forfeit.
It's kind of sad that we don't do that for all domains. Domain squatters can go to hell.
I've started using .internal
As I understand it, if you want to use domains internally for your home ("home") network, there's some DNS support for "home.arpa"[0]. 0 - https://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc8375.html
> We do not recommend use of unregistered top-level domains at all, but should network operators decide to do this, the following top-level domains have been used on private internal networks without the problems caused by trying to reuse ".local." for this purpose:
.intranet.
.internal.
.private.
.corp.
.home.
.lan.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> How are you going to pay for the (substantial) cost of running a TLD without registration fee revenue? Is this a loss leader for other services? Are you operating on a 100% donation model? We plan on operating the domain as a public good and are actively seeking sponsors to help fund us. Think of it as a similar model to ISRG and LetsEncrypt. > No parking, squatting, or reselling Our rule of one person per subdomai…
> Think of it as a similar model to ISRG and LetsEncrypt. In that case it was started by an institution (mozilla) with a lot of heft in the area (mozilla's CA program is one of the most broadly used) and was backed by other orgs (google) that had a vested interest in it's success. I'd be interested to hear which potential sponsors you see in a similar situation here? > rule of one person per subdomain What is the pla…
We are reaching out to companies who operate in the self-hosted space, academia, ISPs, registars, as well as digital rights orgs. We believe they would be aligned with this mission and ultimately benefit from such a TLD existing!
> What is the plan to (without costly overhead or cost to the end user) validate who is an actual person? Even large corporations with loads of resources have problems with this without resorting to treating it as if a person equals a credit card number.
There are a few emerging technologies we are evaluating to help with this but have not settled on one just yet. Whatever we choose, we will start small and go from there. Worst-case scenario, we start with the credit card approach and iterate. This will ultimately all be a part of the evaluation process we go through with ICANN.
They're allowing comments and obviously the first thing there is a scam.
No way any goodwill on the Internet is going to prosper. Not anymore.