Undiplomatic, maybe, but not trolling. Outside a few crusty dusty grumpy old neckbeards, nobody on this planet gives a shit who gets to use which characters and dots. And frankly, I don’t think they’re wrong.
Sure, what we have here is a screamingly obvious instance of nepotistic grift, but it’s totally the wrong thing to fixate on. The hard truth is TLDs shed any semblance of semantic significance long ago; between SEO, squatters, and the great unwashed mass, what matters now is not meaning but visibility. A commercial (.com) domain nowadays could be a non-profit, personal homepage, hardcore prawns and illegal warez; sometimes even an actual business. Regional domains are just as meaningless: Indian Ocean (.io) the must-have address for pretentious nerd tech; India (.in) and US (.us) pure catnip for pathological punsters; and so on. TLDs nowadays are merely an ontological exercise in separating marks from their money. Embarrassing, but just not important; so forget that, and move on.
The real problem with domains is their ongoing inability to do the one job we do need done right: reliably persistently tying Real World entities to their online global presence, and vice-versa. Ask yourself: who owns your internet (domain-based) identity? You don’t; at best you rent one for a little while, but between spoofs, hijacks, simple homonyms, and the inevitable renewal expiry dates, your ability to vouchsafe your online representation for the rest of the world is a paper-thin joke; as trustworthy and dependable as a three-bob note.
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TL;DR: .ORG sell-off is a symptom, not the problem. The problem is Lack of Trust endemic in the current system. Any why should the individuals and institutions behind it want to make it any more trustworthy, while it so easily facilitates their own petty bureaucratic irrelevant graft?
Ultimately, I don't see it being solved anytime soon unless we figure out how to decentralize DNS and the new solution becomes mainstream.
At the end of the day, the internet is just a bunch of machines with IP addresses. DNS is just a layer on top of it that makes it easier for humans to type in a name to get to a machine.
Why do we even have registrars at all? Why do we have the ICANN? There's no way in hell that my domain name (which is essentially just a line in a database somewhere pointed at an IP address) actually costs any entity $10 a year to maintain the infrastructure for. It's all a giant grift, and the people in control have been straight up printing money for years now.
Why do we let these organizations have so much control over us? We are hackers. Let's come up with a decentralized solution and paint these assholes out of the picture already.
(I am not GP) I agree that they are good points. And yet, somehow, the parent post is sitting there heavily downvoted. Does it mean that people like the current system?
Sure, what we have here is a screamingly obvious instance of nepotistic grift, but it’s totally the wrong thing to fixate on. The hard truth is TLDs shed any semblance of semantic significance long ago; between SEO, squatters, and the great unwashed mass, what matters now is not meaning but visibility. A commercial (.com) domain nowadays could be a non-profit, personal homepage, hardcore prawns and illegal warez; sometimes even an actual business. Regional domains are just as meaningless: Indian Ocean (.io) the must-have address for pretentious nerd tech; India (.in) and US (.us) pure catnip for pathological punsters; and so on. TLDs nowadays are merely an ontological exercise in separating marks from their money. Embarrassing, but just not important; so forget that, and move on.
The real problem with domains is their ongoing inability to do the one job we do need done right: reliably persistently tying Real World entities to their online global presence, and vice-versa. Ask yourself: who owns your internet (domain-based) identity? You don’t; at best you rent one for a little while, but between spoofs, hijacks, simple homonyms, and the inevitable renewal expiry dates, your ability to vouchsafe your online representation for the rest of the world is a paper-thin joke; as trustworthy and dependable as a three-bob note.
..
TL;DR: .ORG sell-off is a symptom, not the problem. The problem is Lack of Trust endemic in the current system. Any why should the individuals and institutions behind it want to make it any more trustworthy, while it so easily facilitates their own petty bureaucratic irrelevant graft?