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by domador 1997 days ago
Another impression I got from Richard Barnes' thinkpiece is his apparent opinion that managing the .org registry was turning into a resource-intensive, time-consuming responsibility for the Internet Society and a distraction from its main mission. If that were the case, then how about if the .org registry were turned over to a non-profit that was solely and strictly dedicated to running the registry responsibly and affordably? Is creating such a non-profit feasible? Could it survive over the long term?

For that matter, how much does running a TLD registry with a few million domains actually cost? To me, the whole domain name registration business reeks of rent-seeking and of the exploitation of monopolies, but I'm don't know enough about it yet to confirm these suspicions.

1 comments

> If that were the case, then how about if the .org registry were turned over to a non-profit that was solely and strictly dedicated to running the registry responsibly and affordably? Is creating such a non-profit feasible? Could it survive over the long term?

.de is run by a non-profit and has been since 1996. Before that it had been run by researchers of the University of Karlsruhe. Until a few years ago, .de was the largest ccTLD and the second largest TLD overall.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/DENIC (english, short)

https://de.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/DENIC (german, long and informative)

See also SIDN (https://nl.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stichting_Internet_Domeinreg...), the non-profit managing the 6th biggest ccTLD: .nl