[geofft]

This is like saying "Whether people like it or not the King of France is sovereign." Why is the operation of the DNS a commercial endeavor, and what would go wrong if it were not be the case? There are a huge number of examples of successful internet infrastructure projects that are non-commercial, perhaps with commercial participants or sponsors but not commercial themselves. (The IETF, Let's Encrypt, and Linux all come to mind.)

https://www.potaroo.net/ispcol/2020-09/root.html (posted on HN a while ago) says that the DNS root servers get about 10^11 queries per day, or one million queries per second. Hitting 10K queries per second on a single server is entirely doable, so you would just need 100 cloud VMs to handle the entire root DNS load.

I realize the TLD servers are more loaded than the roots, but it's still not so much traffic that it's entirely out of the question to make it a community-run service on the basis of traffic / engineering effort. So what other reason is there that it must be commercial?

(Note that there are over 10 million .org domain names, and they charge fees of about $9. Even if you cut fees to $1, that's still plenty of money for both infrastructure and labor. You could hire a team of ten SREs at very-senior-FAANG salaries and still have a bunch of money left over.)

[tialaramex]

The IETF probably isn't a useful example because it's a fairly strange thing. You probably couldn't (and shouldn't try to) do very much else that way. It's doubtful whether for example it constitutes an "organisation".

It has no formal legal existence whatsoever, so it can't own anything, including money, nor enter into any sort of contract with anybody, it doesn't have members, and the staff who make things happen aren't working for the IETF per se.

Something like ISRG (the organisation that provides the Let's Encrypt service you mentioned) is much more conventional, there's a not-for-profit legal entity in a specific place with employees, equipment and so on. It would be reasonable to run a TLD that way, and in fact I assume some of them are indeed run that way.

[geofft]

Who owns ietf.org etc.? I guess the answer is the Internet Society, which created the Public Interest Registry which currently owns .org (and which was the entity that intended to sell PIR to Ethos Capital), so maybe the IETF was a bad example for that reason too :)

[longtailofsighs]

This why is a choice made by the NTIA in the late 90s, I think. And, to be fair, the coordination of the DNS via ICANN is a non-commercial affair.

I just don't think it's worth entertaining the idea of trying to de-commercialize the operation of the DNS. You've got about ~450 families of gtld Registrars, some 200 or so Registries including behemoths like Verisign. All with contracts, obligations, shareholders, infrastructure etc. You can't put that genie back in the bottle, or at least not without a myriad of consequences.