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by shepherdjerred 1283 days ago
> They're just a business that deals with the annoying details around registering a domain on your behalf, and you pay them a small fee to do so.

I mean, yes, sure. That's technically how it works, but in practice I'm not sure that really matter. What happens to your domain if your Google account gets banned? Does your domain disappear? Does Google let you transfer it out?
2 comments
RSZC 1283 days ago
That's the point. In a distributed world, the domain registrar doesn't get to determine who gets a domain and who doesn't. If one registrar doesn't want to work with you, you can work with another.

This isn't some hypothetical, unrealistic utopia - this is *how the web worked*. We gave that away by giving registrars sole control over tlds.

It's easy to say 'well nobody really cares about .dev domains anyway' - but why will it just be .dev moving forward? Is it so hard to imagine a world where .com is no longer the default, and companies/individuals have to pay exorbitant monopoly prices to some gatekeeper?

I've never been an activist in this regard. It just feels really shitty to see something that used to belong to us all, everyone, equally, get divvied up and sold off.

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shepherdjerred 1283 days ago
> Is it so hard to imagine a world where .com is no longer the default, and companies/individuals have to pay exorbitant monopoly prices to some gatekeeper?

.com is not a requirement. Companies use non-standard TLDs everywhere. .com is still the default, but you would do just fine with other TLDs, and if some gatekeeper arrived this would only strengthen the argument as businesses would flock to lesser known TLDs.

Of all of the things I worry about regarding computing, the internet, etc., domains does not make the list.

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t-writescode 1283 days ago
> if one registrar doesn't want to work with you, you can work with another.

Registrars are domain *resellers* who sell your domain by buying it from the *registry* for you. There is only one Registry per TLD.

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lupire 1283 days ago
Imagine your whole company losing your domain because one of your employees offended Google ML model at some point and the AI bot declared you guilty by association.
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shepherdjerred 1283 days ago
This exact fear is why I'm planning to move my domains to Cloudflare (unless there's an even better registrar).
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