[rachelbythebay]

Wouldn't it just be a return to the days when domains were free? Back in the mid-'90s, when people I knew registered vanity domains, they tended to come up with some ridiculous expansion of the name to make it look official. Nobody ever checked that "foo" really meant "fraternal otter organization" (or whatever), so those would become the top line in whois.

[eli]

Was that before Network Solutions? I bought a domain in maybe 1996 or 1997 and it was decidedly not free

[rachelbythebay]

Yep. Then it jumped to $100/2 years before competition brought the prices down.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Network_Solutions#Registry_and_...

IP space used to be free, too, as long as you could justify it. What times those were.