Sounds like a bad domain for self hosting. You have to update txt records randomly and your domain can be taken for whatever reason. Whatever value you build goes away if you are inactive. You cannot transfer ownership killing any value you added.

Hence the "in the first year or two". Some more human effort to showcase proof early on, then the domain is solidified for you like iwth any other registrar. This is something like captcha/bcrypt - a single instance isn't a burden, but doing it at scale is costly.

> You cannot transfer ownership killing any value you added

I think this is by design. The domain should be for personal use - hence free.

Exactly this, the goal is to design a TLD according to human-centered principles. That is, we are assuming (and enforcing) that every endpoint using this domain will be some relatively small-scale environment for personal use. This is what will allow us to provide a lot of neat functionality but only at that scale.

I am probably missing something, but how DNS TXT updates can be made difficult to automate?

We can get creative. quick ideas: Send it by printed post. pass it around people to people. an email needs to be added in with some process, and can only get one TXT update value a week.

Many ways of adding friction to obtaining the updatable value - which a human owning a domain would be happy to do, but a squatter would not want to.

> Send it by printed post

that's how one of my local companies tries to force clients in. They removed auth code from their web panels and introduced complex snail-mail procedure.

That was clear signal to run, but it took me 6 months to do just the domain transfer.

> We will send you an auth code via paper mail. The code expires in 30 minutes.

I dislike the term “domain squatting”. It should be called “domain scalping”.

Or domain ownership.

It isn't scalping if your actually using it. It's easy to spot a scalping site since its just an advertisement to buy the domain.

Or domain leasing.

i don't like normalizing people hoarding things they don't need in order to sell them for way higher prices to other people that do, do you?

What if it's a domain I just don't want anybody to use?

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Trouble is that we live in an ecosystem, and "hoard the maximum you can defend, not the minimum you comfortably need" is an optimal behaviour emergent from the system.

An ecosystem with an under-exploited niche will eventually produce the behaviour that fills the niche. It's a self-optimizing system. None of this is fundamentally escapable as long as we are living organisms competing for finite resources.

The much simpler way to avoid squatting is to make .com domains cost $200 a year. This will instantly end the vast majority of domain squatting on the .com TLD and if people can easily get the .com they need for their business then the other TLDs are not going to have much squatting activity.

How does this lend itself to self-hosting then? I think few people will pay that much to self host.

I don't get it. How do you handle 10k people wanting, say, garden.com, without a free market?

first served or random from a waitlist are other options.

First come first served is capitalism in disguise. Someone will automate a tool that watches for these and jumps on them, and the person with the most resources, can get a close network connection, etc will "buy" it.

Same with waitlists.

It's impossible to avoid capitalism!

the most fair distribution for limited sought-after resources that are inconsequential (like domain names) are raffles. let people apply in a 4-week window and then randomly assign it to one of the applicants.

then don't allow reselling, just allow giving it back and do a raffle again

how about make it round-robin, so all 10k of them get a fair slice of traffic? ;)

> The much simpler way to avoid squatting is to make .com domains cost $200 a year

A monopolist hiking prices to this extent will likely see legal action against them. That's a 20x increase you're proposing.

It's also unlikely to have a material effect. .com used to cost $75 a year back in the day, and that didn't stop squatters, and high value domain transfer sales. $75 in 1990s dollars is about $150-$190 today.

Source needed: .com domains never cost more than $100/2 years, IIRC.

You're right, I'm confusing it for $70 to register, which registered the domain for 2 years.

.id.au already has some similar requirements for associating a domain with a real world (human) identity: https://www.auda.org.au/au-domain-names/the-different-au-dom...

Also .net.au and .com.au are not available for personal use.

These ideas are gold! Thanks for sharing. I'm gonna noodle on an unholy mix of 2) and 3) since my dynamic DNS provider just asks that you login once every 30 days and a hash of a (valid) state ID or DL would be an acceptable burden I feel for issuing a domain (or subdomain even).

#2, name matching valid government ID excludes trans people who have not yet legally changed their name. Same reason they can’t get a Meta Verified status, even if paying. Thanks technology for keeping things accessible to everyone!</s>

> Sign in with passkeys linked to a national ID

With what?? Please understand that all countries are not like yours. In France this will happen in 2047 if all planets are aligned (they won't be)