Comment by anilgulecha
18 hours ago
The "one free domain per person" isn't the interesting part really - that will be hard to police unless domain name is a function of ID proof (avoids squatting).
0) The actual intersting part of a new TLD can be growing reputation by post-facto taking away a domain without recourse in case of squatting. Instead of adversarial takedowns (which produce false positives as noted), let anyone challenge an inactive domain in the first year or two.
1) If they can figure out a mechanism for moving a domain from "assigned" -> "squatted".
2) Domain must match (or derive from) a verified identity - e.g. your domain is a hash/slug of your government ID. Makes squatting structurally impossible because you can't claim someone else's name / gov (Sign in with passkeys linked to a national ID).
3) Proof of human effort, reduced with time - require periodic renewal with proof-of-use (DNS TXt updates, through a flow hard to automate).
4) Kill speculative market - domains are non-sellable and non-transferable - always go back to the free pool, and stay there for 30 days mandatorily.
Some mix of these could be the right structure for a trule high-reputation, free domain.
Sounds like a bad domain for self hosting. You have to update txt records randomly and your domain can be taken for whatever reason. Whatever value you build goes away if you are inactive. You cannot transfer ownership killing any value you added.
Hence the "in the first year or two". Some more human effort to showcase proof early on, then the domain is solidified for you like iwth any other registrar. This is something like captcha/bcrypt - a single instance isn't a burden, but doing it at scale is costly.
> You cannot transfer ownership killing any value you added
I think this is by design. The domain should be for personal use - hence free.
Exactly this, the goal is to design a TLD according to human-centered principles. That is, we are assuming (and enforcing) that every endpoint using this domain will be some relatively small-scale environment for personal use. This is what will allow us to provide a lot of neat functionality but only at that scale.
I dislike the term “domain squatting”. It should be called “domain scalping”.
Or domain ownership.
It isn't scalping if your actually using it. It's easy to spot a scalping site since its just an advertisement to buy the domain.
i don't like normalizing people hoarding things they don't need in order to sell them for way higher prices to other people that do, do you?
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Or domain leasing.
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These ideas are gold! Thanks for sharing. I'm gonna noodle on an unholy mix of 2) and 3) since my dynamic DNS provider just asks that you login once every 30 days and a hash of a (valid) state ID or DL would be an acceptable burden I feel for issuing a domain (or subdomain even).
.id.au already has some similar requirements for associating a domain with a real world (human) identity: https://www.auda.org.au/au-domain-names/the-different-au-dom...
Also .net.au and .com.au are not available for personal use.
The much simpler way to avoid squatting is to make .com domains cost $200 a year. This will instantly end the vast majority of domain squatting on the .com TLD and if people can easily get the .com they need for their business then the other TLDs are not going to have much squatting activity.
> The much simpler way to avoid squatting is to make .com domains cost $200 a year
A monopolist hiking prices to this extent will likely see legal action against them. That's a 20x increase you're proposing.
It's also unlikely to have a material effect. .com used to cost $75 a year back in the day, and that didn't stop squatters, and high value domain transfer sales. $75 in 1990s dollars is about $150-$190 today.
How does this lend itself to self-hosting then? I think few people will pay that much to self host.
I don't get it. How do you handle 10k people wanting, say, garden.com, without a free market?
how about make it round-robin, so all 10k of them get a fair slice of traffic? ;)
the most fair distribution for limited sought-after resources that are inconsequential (like domain names) are raffles. let people apply in a 4-week window and then randomly assign it to one of the applicants.
then don't allow reselling, just allow giving it back and do a raffle again
first served or random from a waitlist are other options.
I am probably missing something, but how DNS TXT updates can be made difficult to automate?
We can get creative. quick ideas: Send it by printed post. pass it around people to people. an email needs to be added in with some process, and can only get one TXT update value a week.
Many ways of adding friction to obtaining the updatable value - which a human owning a domain would be happy to do, but a squatter would not want to.
> Send it by printed post
that's how one of my local companies tries to force clients in. They removed auth code from their web panels and introduced complex snail-mail procedure.
That was clear signal to run, but it took me 6 months to do just the domain transfer.
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#2, name matching valid government ID excludes trans people who have not yet legally changed their name. Same reason they can’t get a Meta Verified status, even if paying. Thanks technology for keeping things accessible to everyone!</s>