Is there any TLD registry (not registrar) and accompanying domain name extension (.com, .net and so on) out there that’s owned by a small/independent, i.e. trustworthy business? Feels like they’re all owned by some creepy mega-corp.
.blog owned by Automattic is a decent example, though they’re not exactly very indie anymore, and have come under strong scrutiny of late. I wonder if there are even better alternatives.
there’s .org which is owned by the PIR not-for-profit, which supports the Internet Society and the IETF (tho they had a fit of crazy and tried to sell themselves to private equity but fortunately wiser minds prevailed)
many european ccTLDs are run by relatively small not-for-profit institutions, often great supporters of open source and open standards
@erlend (For context, I used to do cybersecurity for the UK Government - specifically domain names).
The costs of running a registry are substantial - so there has been a lot of consolidation. For a small registry like .gov.uk we outsourced all of that to Nominet.
Some TLDs which were ran by small businesses (like .ml) got over-run by spam and weren't able to keep up with the demands of running a safe service.
Almost any small ones will be backed by something much larger.
@Edent@erlend .ml and .uk are country code TLDs, though. Aren’t those automatically set aside for countries? That is, no one except a country is allowed to administer those, right?
@Edent .tel is pretty cool! They seem to have a rather dev-oriented background as well, although that doesn’t appear to be part of their modern persona.
@Edent@erlend it was always my hope that webfinger (plus some extra bits) could be used for contact details (I think webfinger is properly understood as "DNS for People[/things/etc]").
By using the ability to do key lookups, it's not too complicated to build an authenticated profile server that wouldn't rely on a shared/trusted service.
I imagine something like a Facebook profile page with "friends-only" visibility for profile details, etc. Could work really well with Signal's new usernames..
@Edent I sent them an email to make them aware of this conversation:
> Your company might have a rather unique opportunity to position itself as one of the few independently owned TLD registries still around, which is a very appealing prospect to people in the resurgent fediverse and indieweb.
Would be really cool to have an especially fedi-friendly TLD registry around.
@Edent@erlend this is such an important conversation to be having. Glad to see it discussed. I wonder what Njalla things about this situation since they are some of the only people trying to run a registrar quite differently. Also I just heard at #37c3 from the GNUnet GNS people that they just got approval of .alt and they are planning to run it as far as I understood.
@Edent@erlend Oh, I see what you mean. Does the government front the costs of the registration, though (or does ICANN even require the fee for govts)? There’s a pretty hefty yearly fee, iirc.
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