[mapgrep]

Rhetorical question: Why must we charge annually to control domains? Should we stop doing this in the name of greater URL stability?

The article states early on, “Except insolvency, nothing prevents the domain name owner from keeping the name.” As it turns out, insolvency is a pretty significant source of URL rot, but also so is non renewal of domains by choice or by apathy, whether for financial or mere personal energy reasons (“who is my registrar again? Where do I go to renew?”) especially by individuals. You start a project and ten years later your interest has waned.

Domains are an increasingly abundant resource as TLDs proliferate. Why not default to a model where you pay once up front for the domain, and thereafter continued control is contingent on maintaining a certain percentage of previously published resources, and if you fail at that some revocable mechanism kicks in that serves mirrored versions of your old urls. Funding of these mirrors comes from the up front domain fees. Design of the mechanism is left as an exercise for the reader :-)

[Symbiote]

There's one additional way people can lose domains: if they no longer meet the policies that allow them to keep the domain.

- The UK leaving the EU means British companies can't keep their .eu domains, unless they have a subsidiary in the EU.

- A trademark dispute can mean someone loses a domain.

[ricardo81]

The registration process is more or less automated for almost all TLDs, if they were free then it'd be a bot race to register absolutely everything.

If limited per customer it'd still be a similar situation, probably involving lots of 'fake' accounts and registrant details.

Years ago .info domains were being sold very cheaply. Their registrations skyrocketed and the quality of the average .info domain clearly went down.

[MaxBarraclough]

It's true that domains shouldn't be free, but it's a pity the money ends up piling up at ICANN. If I understand correctly, they have hundreds of millions of dollars just sitting around, on account of their monopoly.

[ocdtrekkie]

Domain renewal is definitely the lesser cost to maintaining a website. If you can afford the server, the domain is basically free already.

[cyberbanjo]

Why is that? I can point a domain at free hosting. GitHub Pages and SDF.org come to mind.

[account42]

For most websites maybe, but you can change host to cut costs if needed. Not so with domains if you want to keep the URLs working.

[mapgrep]

Blogger and Tumblr will map a domain to a blog for free.

[dwighttk]

And that will definitely not change in 100 years

[mapgrep]

Blogger has been serving urls for something like 17 years. I’d wager its sites have something like 2x or more average url lifespan at this point than the typical site. What we want right now is more url stability not perfect assurance of 100 year url lifespan. Don’t let the perfect be the enemy of the good.

[jimhefferon]

> Why must we charge annually to control domains?

Namespace pollution. What if my great-great grandson wants my user name on Google? I took it. Similarly, I took the .net domain with my last name.

[saagarjha]

> Why must we charge annually to control domains?

Spam, squatting, maybe.

[metrokoi]

Charging a small annual fee to me seems to be a much more elegant solution than any sort of domain monitoring system. It is a very simple way to make defunct domains available again and provide some resistance against one person registering massive amounts of domains.

[account42]

It works OK to recover unused domains (but definitely no perfectly) but it does mean nearly all URLs get broken eventually even if the content is still archived somewhere.