@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.