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ICANN lifts the price cap on .org domains

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Re: ICANN lifts the price cap on .org domains

#91

Post by extra88 »

harshitaneja wrote: post #90
enobrev wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think it would be absolutely incredible to peruse old blogs and websites from a century ago. Clippings from 75 year old newspapers or letters are interesting for plenty of reasons. The cost of things; The news of the day; The writing style. Imagine direct access to this sort of content from 750 years ago!

That's why we have wayback machine. Or we use another way to archive it.

As the Wayback Machine currently operates, the present owner of a domain name can make the archives go away.

Re: ICANN lifts the price cap on .org domains

#92

Post by antonvs »

enobrev wrote: post #81
horsawlarway wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your vision sounds pretty terrible. At a very cursory glance it seems fine - I don't want my information web to degrade. Once you dig even a little bit into this, though... you get a quagmire of old and useless information. Outdated sites never go away. They just become a constant burden on the whole system. Information that's been refuted and invalidated years back is still alive and kicking because a domain exists…

I think it would be absolutely incredible to peruse old blogs and websites from a century ago. Clippings from 75 year old newspapers or letters are interesting for plenty of reasons. The cost of things; The news of the day; The writing style. Imagine direct access to this sort of content from 750 years ago!

Someone's going to have to pay for hosting that data, though. The domain name is only a small part of the picture.

Re: ICANN lifts the price cap on .org domains

#93

Post by comex »

harshitaneja wrote: post #90
enobrev wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think it would be absolutely incredible to peruse old blogs and websites from a century ago. Clippings from 75 year old newspapers or letters are interesting for plenty of reasons. The cost of things; The news of the day; The writing style. Imagine direct access to this sort of content from 750 years ago!

That's why we have wayback machine. Or we use another way to archive it.

The Wayback Machine is great, but it's basically a hack. Archiving shouldn't depend on a single centralized entity occasionally crawling the web and saving chunks of it to its archive (but only what it finds during the crawl, and excluding content with large file sizes, such as videos).

It ought to be built into the architecture of the Web, decentralized, immediate, and (at least for small file sizes) on by default. Oh, and censorship-resistant. Even for large file sizes, I think there ought to be some very easy-to-use mechanism to donate either hard disk space or money to publicly archive content of your choice.

Those are lofty goals, of course, but the current web has is quite vulnerable to bitrot as it is, and there's no guarantee the Internet Archive will continue to operate indefinitely.

Re: ICANN lifts the price cap on .org domains

#94

Post by dragonwriter »

comex wrote: post #93
harshitaneja wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's why we have wayback machine. Or we use another way to archive it.

The Wayback Machine is great, but it's basically a hack. Archiving shouldn't depend on a single centralized entity occasionally crawling the web and saving chunks of it to its archive (but only what it finds during the crawl, and excluding content with large file sizes, such as videos). It ought to be built into the architecture of the Web, decentralized, immediate, and (at least for small file sizes) on by default.…

> Archiving shouldn't depend on a single centralized entity

It doesn't. It's decentralized, with lots of archivists, it's just not federated.

Re: ICANN lifts the price cap on .org domains

#95

Post by xur17 »

ailideex wrote: post #85
CameronNemo wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can you explain how the miners can price discriminate against certain domains? Seems like the network fee would need to be identical for every concurrent transaction.

I don't know exact details, but if it works like bitcoin miners can refuse to put renewals in blocks if the fees is not high enough.

In which case you can just wait until there are less transactions waiting to be confirmed, driving the price up (it's a renewal, so you have plenty of time to complete it).

Re: ICANN lifts the price cap on .org domains

#96

Post by walrus01 »

kristopolous wrote: post #87
walrus01 wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Personally I think it's a bad idea for any corporation to have a whole gtld, Amazon or otherwise.

it's been like this since the 90s though. Things like .CX, .TV etc were managed by small firms who bought the rights and thought they could make megabucks with it ...

those aren't gtlds, those are cctlds where the "ministry of communications" or equivalent in some tiny country has been sufficiently bribed by a bunch of domain registrar grifters.

Re: ICANN lifts the price cap on .org domains

#97

Post by killjoywashere »

In light of the prior article about ICANN as an unaccountable private company (1), this is a good time to encourage everyone to read Bruce Bueno de Mesquita's The Dictator's Handbook (2). This is a classic setup for dictatorship by a small cabal (the board): a vast, unempowered populace, a clear source of money (increasing domain fees), and a fairly small elite that needs to be compromised, particularly relative to the size of the unempowered populace.

If governments and corporations haven't already started buying influence, I'd be shocked.

(1) https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2015/sep/21/icann-int...

(2) https://www.amazon.com/Dictators-Handbook-Behavior-Almost-Po...

Re: ICANN lifts the price cap on .org domains

#98

Post by lone_haxx0r »

creeble wrote: post #47
danShumway wrote: post #43

I'm slowly starting to suspect that maybe having human-readable names for domains is a mistake. Partially because phishing domains is already kind of easy (the rapid increase in tlds isn't helping ), partially because the race to grab and hold names has been having increasing negative effects, and partially because (aside from domains) many actual URLs are already impossible to remember. We're running into the same p…

The DNS only provides one upside: memorable names. But there aren't enough downsides to ever be more important than this one feature, or you would just be telling people IP addresses already.

>you would just be telling people IP addresses already.

That's doable in ipv4, probably with some rebasing: e.g. converting decimal to hex, 192.168.0.1 becomes c0.a8.00.01

IPv6 addresses, on the other hand, are unmanageable with bare human memory, but I quite like the idea of every person managing their own hosts file, listed with a mnemonic name for their favorite addresses.

Re: ICANN lifts the price cap on .org domains

#99

Post by walshemj »

halfmatthalfcat wrote: post #53
will_brown wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Contrast this with acquiring a business name through any Department of State/Division of Corporations. What do you mean by this? Generally if a corporate name is registered (example: ABC, INC.) most states will not allow another “ABC” to be registered (even if ending in another suffix like “Corp” or even if another type of entity like an LLC). I had a client in a certain state who registered their entity name as MSG…

I mean if a name is available to use, you can just use it. There's no negotiation, no price barrier, nothing. I think most of my frustration is toward the domain squatting/reselling industry.

Isn't starting a company rather expensive in the USA compared to say in the UK

Re: ICANN lifts the price cap on .org domains

#100

Post by tzs »

danShumway wrote: post #43

I'm slowly starting to suspect that maybe having human-readable names for domains is a mistake. Partially because phishing domains is already kind of easy (the rapid increase in tlds isn't helping ), partially because the race to grab and hold names has been having increasing negative effects, and partially because (aside from domains) many actual URLs are already impossible to remember. We're running into the same p…

> I'm slowly starting to suspect that maybe having human-readable names for domains is a mistake

I've been coming to the same conclusion, for different reasons.

I've been thinking of getting some meaningless domain name, like 5aeca67f937de276.net [1], and then using email addresses at that domain for the contact email or login email at as many places as possible.

The idea is that if I use any meaningful name, there is a chance that some company will come along that does business under the same name, and will dispute my use of the domain name. At best, that will be a hassle to prove I'm not just cybersquatting, and at worst I could lose the domain and have to change my email at dozens, or even hundreds, of places.

I'm probably safe on my current main domain, tzs.net, because I've had it for around 21 years [2], and every time someone has inquired about buying it from me, I've responded saying that although it does not have a large web presence and so may appear lightly used it is in fact used for a lot of non-public web stuff, and extensively used for email. I don't even ask what they are offering for it. I tell them it would simply be impractical for me to move to another domain, and so it is not for sale. This should make a reasonable case that I'm not cybersquatting.

[1] Randomly generated by taking 64 bits from /dev/urandom and printing it in hex. I was thinking of 128 bits, but an email address that is @5aeca67f937de2760159265d458ba3d0.net might be too long for some poorly designed login forms.

[2] The first owner was my employer at the time, which bought tzs.net, tzs.com, and tzs.org because my boss thought I might like them. When those expired a year later, they transferred to me whichever ones I wanted to keep. I kept tzs.net and the other two expired.

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