[talhah]

While freenom did genuinely have issues with spam and the like.

I must say it played a pivotal role in my life, it allowed me to do my passion and have a domain name in my early teens when I couldn't pay for anything. Being able to toy with a domain name led me down many rabbit holes and led to me trying out self-hosting and system administration.

Sad we can't have free things.

[seszett]

I have mixed feelings as well, for the same reason, but I find it absolutely terrible that the citizens of Mali, RCA, Gabon, and Equatorial Guinea have basically been robbed of their TLD by their (mostly failed) governments.

[esperent]

.io is similarly problematic. Although at this point I think the best solution would be to retroactively set .io to mean Input/Output and give the Chagossians a new TLD.

https://tamouse.github.io/blog/politics/2019/10/02/why-is-th...

EDIT: it could also be argued that this controversy is beneficial for the Chagossians I guess. I didn't know anything about them until I purchased a .io domain a few years ago.

[TheCleric]

Do you not see the obvious irony in taking a people who were forcibly removed from their home so it could be given to others, issuing them a TLD, and now you're suggesting forcibly removing that from them and giving it to others?

[dchftcs]

It's something they didn't really ask for, never meaningfully utilized anyway, and ultimately is an entry in a table on some servers they can't really care less about.

You can fantasize about the hardships the citizens suffered for the appropriation of the .io TLD and draw any analogy you want, but there are probably more pressing needs of the people you're not addressing by spending time to supply this sort of sympathy.

Worse, imagine a world where you actually advocate for the displaced indigenous people to care about this problem. Probably you'd be asking them to divert attention from real problems such as being able to afford food tomorrow.

[TheCleric]

No, the real problems are obviously more important. I'm just pointing out the minor insult that echoes the major injury that would be this plan.

[pxc]

That is really painful.

But if those TLDs don't even bring them any money and they're not named after something in the Chagossian's own language, do they even own them in any meaningful sense?

Aside from the right to return to their homelands, these people should be given some actual royalties from .io domain purchases. And then maybe also a new TLD that is more meaningfully connected to them and less likely to be hijacked.

[esperent]

When I wrote that I wasn't imagining any forcing going on. Rather I was thinking about dialogue happening with the ethnic group in question to try and find a TLD that makes sense in their own language rather than English.

[seanhunter]

I don't buy this at all. Country-specific tlds are more or less a total failure. To the extent they still have a role, it is in having official government sites (eg "gov.uk" in the uk)

Firstly the US never bought into it so all the original successful internet companies are ".coms". For this reason if you are a global company, chances are you would prefer a ".com" to anything else. Most companies want to address a global audience and part of the point of e-commerce is to make this happen. So they don't necessarily want a parochial-seeming national tld but would prefer a global one. This makes country-specific tlds redundant for commerce.

Secondly the people running the national TLDs are (in my experience) often doing so to further their own egos and personal interests and so tend to offer a shitty service. This is why I gave up my ".co.uk" domain some years back. The UK NIC were just annoying in a bunch of different ways.

[changethe]

not sure what world you live in, but ccTLDs are widely used across the world, and in a lot of countries much preferred over .com.

german people, for example, will trust a business running on a .de domain much more than a .com one.

in most cases it is much preferred for an international company to run the country-specific website on the according ccTLD. companies that "want to address a global audience" are a specific set of companies that might prefer a "global" website, but most businesses will run country specific sites, not "global" sites.

also not sure what the UK NIC being "annoying in a bunch of different ways" has to do with anything, or even means.

seems to me like you are living in your own world, far detached from reality.

[seanhunter]

I’m happy to be wrong about this and hear about the thriving ccTLD scene but there’s no reason to get personal and say I’m detached from reality.

The way in which the UK nic used to be annoying that is relevant for this is that they used to make it much harder to register, transfer and renew domains. So at some point even though I had a .co.uk and a .com I just stopped trying to transfer the .co.uk and let it lapse at the next renewal date.

[changethe]

yeah you're right that some registries might have some weird quirks about certain things like transfers or additional mandatory requirements etc.

UK transfers are surely more complicated than they have to be (push vs. pull logic).

and I can also see where you're coming from, since in the UK it doesn't seem to be such a big thing.

but in most other non-english speaking countries (or even .com.au or co.nz), ccTLDs are actually a big trust factor. also for example high-end keyworddomains sell for a multiple of the respective .com domain price. sometimes as much as 5-10 times.

[seszett]

It might be different for the UK, but as others have said ccTLDs in my experience are much preferred over .com. .com is basically used for generic US multinational companies, which means a handful of websites you care about but locally relevant sites are going to be .fr or .be for me.

.fr and .be are as easy to manage as any other TLD, and they have the advantage that you're probably not going to be price gouged as they are not run for profit.

[Fgehono]

'more or less'.

In Europe they are working very well and are used constantly.

.de is used by most Germans. .fr french, .at etc.

[oaw-bct-ar-bamf]

Germany absolutely LOVES their .de TLD.

.de has more weight than .net or .com for most people in Germany.

[talhah]

In Qatar national services use ".qa", and these are not necessarily official government sites.

For example our community schools uses a .qa domain and the biggest telecom provider among various other sites.

What you're saying does not apply to all countries.

[raverbashing]

> Firstly the US never bought into it

"Never bought into is" as never bothered and never cared about other countries (main character syndrome)

[Boltgolt]

A failure in the US maybe, but in countries like The Netherlands it's weird if a Dutch site does NOT have a .nl TLD

[TheFreim]

Same here, running little websites using a free hosting provider and a tk domain was a great experience.

[davchana]

I recently recovered password for my 2002 era davinder.8m.net free website. It is still hsoted all these 20 years for free.

[lathiat]

Yes! My freeservers site from the same era (2000, when I was 15 ) is also somehow still alive. I don’t have the password though. So I cannot fix the error haunting me for all time that I listed Generations as a TV series of Star Trek rather than a movie.

http://stvoyager.iwarp.com/

I’d love to know how/why they’ve managed to keep all of those alive so long. I am very appreciative but equally surprised.

[belltaco]

Storage and bandwidth has gotten orders of magnitude cheaper since then so that might be part of it. Identifying and deleting inactive websites might have deemed to be more expensive than just letting them stay on.

[nine_k]

> the free domain name provider has a long history of ignoring abuse complaints about phishing websites while monetizing traffic to those abusive domains

If the way to have there things is defrauding others, then they are not as free as they seem.

I'd say that a third-level domain is fine for teenage projects; was fine for me even past teens.

[Beached]

can you link me some free third level domain services that allow full control over all records? while I don't need it now, in the past I have wanted such a service and was unable to find them.

[nine_k]

"All records" makes an important difference indeed. I mostly thought about web projects where you need A / AAAA and CNAME. I do remember that I had access to MX and TXT at some free provider around 1995; GeoCities? Can't remember.

[ajosh]

Sitelutions.com still offers this. Without a paid account, the only limitation is the TTL.

[Anunayj]

So far I've only found https://nic.eu.org/ but it works, and I assume it's unlikely to go anywhere for the foreseeable future.

[VWWHFSfQ]

for $8 a year you can get a regular domain and then have as many free 3rd level domains with full DNS control as you want. or do you really just mean free free

[TremendousJudge]

based on the top level comment, I guess free free; something a child without a credit card can use on his own while playing around

[p1necone]

Yeah, the refrain is usually "anyone should be able to afford $8 a year", but I remember being teenager and even when I was making an income I still couldn't get a credit card. It's less about the money and more about the ability to pay.

[5e92cb50239222b]

You don't really need credit cards, we found ways to pay for domains and hosting back in the day when we weren't legally able to get one (due to being minors). Some smaller companies accept other ways to pay that can be used anonymously. I definitely couldn't afford $8 a year thought, so others were covering that.

[mminer237]

Even if you can't get a credit card, most banks will give you a debit card at 13.

[tinus_hn]

It requires specific care because in the DOM security model, third level sites are all in the same security domain and can read each others cookies and control each others pages. The browsers have a special list with gov.uk, co.uk etc so it knows these are special.

That wasn’t a concern in 2002 but today it should be.

[5e92cb50239222b]

I am still using a couple of .cf and .tk domains for semi-serious mail, haven't had any issues with delivery.

[throwawayadvsec]

that's actually really weird

[jeroenhd]

These domains apply a serious bonus to spam scores, but if you do everything else right (send a normal but not too large amount of email, get your mail server from a domain with high reliability, set up SPF/DKIM/DMARC/etc.) you shouldn't fall below the spam line in most spam filters.

[breakingcups]

Given .tk's known practice of seizing domains for their own use, it might be wise to migrate to a more stable TLD.

[ajsnigrutin]

> have a domain name in my early teens

yep, being a kid iterested in tech and having parents, that are not, is probably a huge pain... internet at home and a computer.. sure... giving your credit card info to your kid for some name on the internet? No way s/he's getting that.

Having a free option (and dynamic dns, and possibly even a free virtual machine somewhere) makes a lot of learning and experimenting possible for kids.

[plugin-baby]

> giving your credit card info to your kid for some name on the internet?

I’d guess that in many cases, being interested in tech might make people _less_ likely to do this.