WordPress introduces 100 year domain registrations

Wordpress has already been around one fifth of a century. Yet, it's quite something to appreciate the change that happened between the one tenth of a century before it, so, 1993, and it, so, 2003.

In that time we went from self (and often university) hosted HTML to self-publishing. And it wasn't just Wordpress. A plethora of single-writer and group publishing flourished in an incredibly brief period of time powered in large part by the sudden availability of low priced (and free) hosting and scriptable languages.

In comparison, the past 1/10th of a century has seen little. Choice of JS framework does not revolutionary change make. If anything, there's a now established no turning back movement from federalists, indeed a niche, a result of the swallowing creative and belching out stale innovation FAANGs+ have brought destructive force with. FB does nothing whatsoever now in social good that it didn't do a decade ago. Nor Google. Just as banks do good in facilitating individual with saving, loan and payment solutions, they get fucked up sometimes and in their chasing the last decimal point fuck up people's lives via markets; FAANGs are at the chasing the last decimal point in advertising but fucking up people's lives directly through their brains, and it's got a way to run.

Which roundabout wandering brings me to ask: Will the $100 be put in trust, or similar, to ride out the next revolutionary change in tech that may result in Wordpress no longer be around but some cash needs to be left over for hosting something. The past decade has been all but revolutionary and is no place to base an assumption on the volatility-in-tech two decades down the line.

Does anyone trust them to maintain these for 100 years? This is a money grab - "Pay us up front for 100 years of service." No doubt the terms will include plenty of wiggleroom for the company to backtrack on these promises.

* we maintain multiple backups of your content across geographically distributed data center

* 24/7 Premier Support

* The very best managed WordPress experience with unmetered bandwidth, best-in-class speed, and unstoppable security bundled in one convenient package.

They own .blog so I am guessing they can at least keep that part of the bargain. As to what level of service they can maintain over 100 years, or whether the web as we know it will continue to exist, remains to be seen.

just like unlimited yahoo mail space, or google's unlimited email space or that airline from 80's that took back through technicalities the "lifetime" ticket, no?

I would not trust anything that's long term more than 10 years, and even that is a stretch. I agree with GP, it's a cash grab.

And it’s only $380 per year: https://wordpress.com/100-year/

With inflation, that may almost end up being a fair deal. ($380 in 2023 was about $24 in 1923.)