[blue_pants]

  The commercial domain name system is a perfect example of the type of artificial scarcity capitalism creates and exploits.
  Domain names are tiny little rows in a database. They cost next-to-nothing to set up and maintain. There’s absolutely no reason why they couldn’t be a public good, paid for from the public purse.
  And yet you pay (at times extortionate) amounts for them… why?
  Because capitalism.

Isn't this a bit simplistic? Domain names are a limited resource, so there has to be some way to regulate who can use which domains. What alternative method of regulation would you propose and why it's better?

[aabhay]

Tbh it would be really cool for there to be a TLD dedicated to extremely cheap names, on the order of 0.1-10c. This could enable all kinds of fun use cases, including automated ones.

Lets say the domain is .anything, and your domain had to be at minimum 10 characters to limit the use of squatted names”. Then you could build a website for one purpose like “lets-go-get-pizza-tomorrow.anything” or whatever. Perhaps there could be a mandatory expiry or something.

[ahmedfromtunis]

That's a s(p/c)ammer's dream if there's a lesson to be learned from the.tk experience.

I think this should fall on governments to create such a system for their citizens. A cheap web.de or website.au, would be very practical.

Also I think national regulators would have more legroom to control such domains as they can exclude non-residents and avoid to deal with international rings.

On a personal level, I'd suggest buying a short domain (I own a couple of ab.xy ones) and use that as a personal tld of sorts.

And with Cloudflare, you don't even need to manually configure the DNS settings or let's encrypt.

Having a website up and running in 10 seconds without having to go through the process of registering a domain is such an amazing experience!

[jerbear4328]

Currently, we're pretty limited on 5-character ab.xy domains, and they'll cost you over $1000 USD to register[1]. However, 6 and 7 character domains are available, and can indeed be really useful!

[1]: https://micro.domains

[marginalia_nu]

Worth noting TLDs have a reputation as well.

Having a cheap tld (e.g. .xyz, .pw, .icu) definitely lowers the odds of being able to send emails from your domain name, impairs search engine discovery, and has other similar effects.

[edent]

Freenom used to do that. Free domains on .ml and bunch of other TLDs.

Unsurprisingly, with zero cost and zero registration information, they were very popular with spammers - https://krebsonsecurity.com/2023/05/phishing-domains-tanked-...

I used them for cool domain hacks and - while I'm sad those domains are gone - I'm happy the net is slightly safer.

[areyourllySorry]

xyz is a dollar to register. how much lower can you go?

[thrance]

There's an actually infinite amount of domain names, and if we could use any tld we want, there could be even more.