Chuck asks, “how can we keep domains working long after our death?”

I have a related thought quite often and get annoyed at how deep we are into it:

It’s disappointing that we took the idea of property from the physical world and transferred it directly to the digital world. For things like address management, it’d sure be nice if there was a viable commons.

I like the idea of an Open Registry—not just for longevity, but for how we use the internet now.

We’ve given the namespaces we publish under an arbitrary expiration date when the possibilities should actually be endless. It’s hard enough to keep things going with software and hardware, why restrict ourselves to paying large corporations rent for words that point to something completely virtual?

If Google can pay relatively zero dollars (for them) to stake out the .ing namespace, why can’t I pay relatively zero dollars to stake out .jeremyfelt1979?

The DNS system is already established and it seems like a fairly well funded trust could handle the address space management. Maybe the biggest hurdle is establishing authority and trust.

I guess a way to do this without ICANN is to setup DNS servers that include data from a commons-first registry as well as data from the current DNS root. Maybe submit some .openregistry flavored namespaces as a start to the Public Suffix List. And then convince people to use those DNS servers?

What’s a bummer is that a technical solution for all of that is probably the “easy” part. How to store an archive forever on the other hand, ugh, but HTML has been good for a while, so it could work.

Anyhow… old man shakes fist at virtual arbitrary clouds. 😂

Thanks for the prompt!
Published
Sunday, Nov 5 at 22:45