One of the nice things in DACH (Germany, Austria and Switzerland) is the obligation to put an imprint on the website [0]. This is valid for every hosted site which runs commercially (even if it is a private blog displaying ads).
They must show a phone number, an email address which must be usable as a customer support email (even if it is just named info@...), physical address, who is in charge of the company and other things.
Whenever I try to find out whom a website offering some "new AI stuff" belongs to, I'm baffled to see that other countries don't require this.
It's designed as a public good that lets you look up businesses by their tax ID. It's mandatory for the company owner to put their phone number and address there. The address is periodically verified by an actual person. It gets scraped heavily, and inserted into a whole sub-genre of similar websites with mostly identical features but with faster and better search. I've even seen people print it out to make "phone books" that are sold at trade shows!
As you might expect, the resulting increase in (fairly sophisticated) scam calls makes me unlikely to pick up my phone. So I'm not actually reachable there with a call, but I might get a text! For my websites, registrar info for those ties in to the system above using digital signatures. So using only a domain name, you get the company license, a theoretically valid phone number, and a very probably correct address.
It's a mix of good and bad, but overall I really like the system. Looking up other companies before doing business with them has saved me and my colleagues from a number of bad deals, e.g. not the real company owner, or misrepresentation of the scope of their company license.
AFAIK no universally adopted modern form of communication fulfills both.
How do the US solve this problem ?
In reality, just like in the Paradise Papers leaks etc, an individual accountant's office might have 4000 of these lined up next to their door.
Of course, for the vast majority of businesses, this is not much of a hurdle, and for most consumers it isn't all that helpful either, but end of the day, scammers are gonna scam, whatever the obstacles are. Even those that aren't outright scammers, will be paying accountants to have a plaque on their door to show that this is their "physical office" ...
Hopefully such efforts at least help courts assign some blame when the time comes.
Luckily for a few euros per month you can rent quite nice addresses and the relative mail forwarding services (e.g., once a day, once a week, etc.)
I should have looked up the definition, before using the word.
Too many small inconveniences for a small unprofitable startup that you need to worry about, instead of focusing on finding product market fit.
Because if you want to move your business later, when it grows, the tax office will regard your home as part of the business. Things will get complicated that way.
For your startup, aren't you setting up your DNS, webhosting, etc? aren't these small inconveniences that you're doing instead of "focusing on finding product market fit" ?
Each company, nay, each person has to do some amount of "paperwork" in order to create society that functions. Why should your startup admin be easier then my filling of personal taxes ?
Why would I randomly show up at their house and ring their bell?
There are various service which offer a 'virtual' address with digital forwarding of letters for less than 10Eur/Month, so it's not an insurmountable obstacle.
When one starts in a garage, one doesn’t have an office yet.
That's probably most of what it does, because how much attention of any sort does the average garage startup get?
Or think you scammed them! Crazies gonna crazy.
> how much attention of any sort does the average garage startup get?
I think that anyone who has dealt with the general public in any organisation (scouting, church, business, government) will tell you that a surprisingly large number of people (I have seen estimates as high as one in four!) are crazy to one degree or another.
I would very much rather not have my home address out there for every Tom, Dick & Harry who thinks that my software is making the aliens send radio transmissions to his teeth.
You, me and entire HN is aware of this but who is going to educate millions of people who are already dependent on these services.
Easily half of the world's population now have internet access, and vanishingly few ever manage to scale the walls of the beautiful gardens big companies graciously built for them.
With emphasis on mostly. I believe most of the issues we have we DNS and name allocating could be solved if they were managed by an actual international non-profit organization. Alas, ICANN is an American for-profit company, whose corruption needs no more evidence.
In many ways Google took over the role of DNS for non-technical people, but it's a little hard to advertise a specific search term. It is still possible to have a business without a domain name, but for e.g. WhatsApp, or Telegram, you're putting yourself into a garden with a wall high enough that even Google can't find you.
I have seem more and more companies simply advertise their Facebook or Instagram pages, but that sort of excludes a number of people from their business. Relying on WhatsApp would yield much the same problem.
On solution I could see, at least in some countries, is to have the government provide a "landing page" for each company when they register for their business licens. So you'd get tims-trash-removable.business.com when you register your company and you can then put in links to WhatsApp, Facebook, Instagram, email or a phone number.
Introducing something completely new would be extremely hard.
It's the administrative part that makes it hard: The registration, the expiration, the distributed responsibility of needing a NIC, registrar, DNS operator, hosting platform, Certificate Authority—we're all used to the bullshit, but getting from "I'd like to present my business under this domain" to presenting your business under this domain requires way too much bureaucracy.
The whole process is still stuck in the 90ies: It shouldn't require more than picking a name and providing payment details to get running. Delegation of anything could happen easily via OAuth grants; TLS should just work, given ACME; all other details can be customised if necessary, but normal users should never have to bother with DNS records at all.
I’ve also written a little speculative fiction about what that might look like. https://open.substack.com/pub/noahnorman/p/all-the-kinds-of-...
IE; your signing, email, encryption certificate public and private key are uniquely tied to your face, name, etc. You can do this privately. I can't think of a negative to this system in terms of risk, bloat, fatigue.
All this though assumes you support public certificate authorites and their practices. which is a bit of a walled garden on purpose, and tbh these types of certs aren't really needed right now.
There are hosters that offer a domain + some kind of pre-baked website for like 2-3€ a month, but that's still not free (especially in India) and still not as easy as some social media page / account. Nevertheless, these offerings could be much better and cheaper, especially if there was a reasonably official looking TLD where it's dirt cheap to register a domain name. But is there a business model there? :/
Thinking of IPFS, maybe we shouldn’t refer to content by name and location at once.
Perhaps every business gets a UUID, and that’s the official online ID for that business. Link it to a name only for display (or a list of names, for multiple languages). Now there is the question of how to bind that to a location (IP) online as well as IRL. Maybe a map of business with their UUID maintained by governments based on the post office system to validate it IRL?
Yes. Until they lose their SNS handle for whatever reason and then they find out what some of them actually do care.
I doubt there's much need for long-term number stability in the type of business that prints a number on its sign out the front, anyway. If it does change, you could go back to the business and read the sign again.
AGREE WITH NUANCE
Yep, any form of SNS is just a convenience for them and not the main method of interaction with clients. But for some of them it is the main method and for them losing the access could be quite devastating.
I think the biggest issue is that people have just gotten used to putting @MY_BUSINESS_NAME in their advertising and it's what most users know how to deal with. I reckon most users have never manually typed a URL into the address bar in their lives.
With DNS you are somewhat independent, with social media you’re one executive order away from shutting down the whole economy
> Perhaps we need to rethink discoverability and identity on the internet in ways that are more intuitive for ordinary users
Isn't this why search engines became popular in the first place? Because they "solved" discoverability? And before Instagram and WhatsApp existed, they worked fine.
Isn't the reason businesses moved to Instagram and WhatsApp is because people moved to those services? and not the other way around.
This is just one of things that "works" and you can't really get around. Tangentially related but one of my friends started a photo booth rental business and was asking me about how to build his web presence. At first he suggested a website and I told him he should have a website but I also told him that an solid Instagram account (we are in the US) would work just as well.
Is it batshit crazy on a conceptual level to get into bed with a big tech company for your web presence? Yeah it absolutely is. But does it actually work and is the most likely way for you to drive sales? Yeah it absolutely is.
You assume that business owners should do this themselves, but why? It's very cheap to get a contractor to make you a good website, so that's what business owners should do: contract somebody to do it. That's what business owners also do for signage, print promotion, accounting, machine maintenance, etc.
Most things except for breathing i too complex for most people, including for business owners. That's why there's business-to-business professional services.
Are there any good resources/blogs/people/etc I should look at to learn more?
I think we need an alternative to DNS as we know it. Here in India, millions of successful business owners have never heard of DNS. They run profitable enterprises entirely through WhatsApp and use social media pages for their marketing presence.
The reason is straightforward: social media platforms have made it incredibly easy to establish an online presence. These entrepreneurs don't care about domain ownership – an Instagram profile with substantial followers represents real business success to them.
This pattern extends globally. Remember when celebrities maintained their own websites a decade ago? Today, most have abandoned personal sites in favor of social media followings in the millions.
The traditional website + DNS model is simply too complex for most people, so they gravitate toward walled gardens. While this creates platform dependency issues, it also reveals a fundamental UX problem with how we've structured the web's addressing system.
Perhaps we need to rethink discoverability and identity on the internet in ways that are more intuitive for ordinary users, rather than expecting everyone to become amateur system administrators.