@zbrando @morrick @ueeu You’re not wrong.

But, looking ahead, we can do so much better than the commercial domain name system.

Commercial domain names are a gold standard example of artificial scarcity. A domain name registrar cost next to nothing to operate. It’s tiny rows of text in a database. It could easily be free to own your own domain name – a huge part of what constitutes identity – on the Internet.

In fact, a non-commercial service has been operational for 24 years. It would be trivial to regulate that browsers in the EU implement support for it and work together with, say, @letsencrypt to ensure it can handle TLS.

That would be an amazing addition to the commons and a future-proof way forward that we could lead on with next to no investment.

#domainNames #DNS #openNic #LetsEncrypt #EU #commons #internet #freedom #ICAAN

@ErikUden (Actually, I’m not sure that’s more succinct after all but you get the gist. It blows my mind how much potential we’re sacrificing for democratising the Web because the focus is on corporations making profit by selling database records. Capitalism has once again taken an infinite resource and implemented artificial scarcity so a relative handful can make a profit at the expense of realising our potential as a species. The shortsightedness makes me angry.)

#icaan #icaan78

@ErikUden Or, more succinctly, “Why have we tied the primary means of identity on the World Wide Web to the business model of corporations charging often exuberant amounts for what is essentially records in a database and can we please at least consider allowing non-commercial entities to offer non-commercial access to domain names for the common good?”

#icaan #icaan78 #SmallWeb

@ErikUden Wanna also talk to them about some very small ones if you get the chance? ;)

https://ar.al/2020/08/07/what-is-the-small-web/

#icaan #icaan78 #SmallWeb