A "Let's Encrypt" style org for a 3 letter TLD would be interesting. And it doesn't even have to be in the "completely free" sense, just an industry backed org interested in providing a well managed TLD without an interest in making a profit from doing so.
I know there were places like tk but they were less an organization managing the TLD and more a phishing and SPAM pit which still had a paid side of the business anyways. Other places offer varying things on this spectrum for subdomains but it's not a TLD and they often don't attempt to solve any of the actual problems offering domains does.
An alternative root just feels excessive given we only need 1 "good natured" TLD for the way we use the web to remain unchanged while preventing price gouging to host on it.
Absolutely abysmal of verisign. I still remember back when they made every NXDOMAIN resolve to their shitty web-search breaking the internet. Lasted about a week.
I put bbs.io on there for use with online/telnet bulletin boards... I also put a couple other domains I have on there as well.
Not sure I'd want a free tld, but would definitely like one that doesn't allow some of the seo gaming allowed on the other tlds and had something closer to a fixed price that allowed the registrar to operate as well as other reg's to make say $2/yr on... maybe $5/yr or something.
While I’d love to see that, it’s known that anything free will be majorly abused for various attacks. Heck, even paid but cheap TLDs like xyz are often completely blocked in corporate networks.
I agree, that's why I think it's less about being free and more about not being for-profit and given lots of funding by major industry backers for that purpose to help keep revenue incentives less interesting. It's fine to pay a good price for proper identity validation, abuse mediation, avoiding low dollar scams, and the like. The cost to be avoiding is just ramping up the price year by year to increase margin.
I know there were places like tk but they were less an organization managing the TLD and more a phishing and SPAM pit which still had a paid side of the business anyways. Other places offer varying things on this spectrum for subdomains but it's not a TLD and they often don't attempt to solve any of the actual problems offering domains does.
An alternative root just feels excessive given we only need 1 "good natured" TLD for the way we use the web to remain unchanged while preventing price gouging to host on it.