On Fri, Aug 16, 2024 at 10:02 AM John Levine <johnl@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
It appears that tom petch <daedulus@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> said:
>FWIW, one reason most alumni addresses are forwarding-only is that other orgs, like Apple and HP, offer educational discounts, but you
>need to send FROM a .edu address to qualify.
I have heard that theory, but since it doesn't apply in New Haven CT my alternate explanation is
that some schools do it that way because it is cheaper or was easier to implement at the time.
>In passing, I do not think it is possible, at least with the registrars I know of, to buy a domain in any legal sense of that word.
It used to be possible in .US but not any more. My church has a letter from USDoC saying that
our domain unitarian.ithaca.ny.us is ours permanently.
The problem here is that expiry of DNS registrations wasn't something anyone in IETF or ICANN ever designed. It was a power grab by NSF looking for $25 of the original $35 fee. We never got the chance to sit down and ask whether name registrations should be perpetual or expire.
We moved from a system where Jon Postel gave you a name which you were unlikely to ever lose to one that has been captured by rent seeking. And thanks to EFF's grandstanding, the one organization that should have absolutely nothing to do with registering names is defacto funded/underwritten by the .org registry.
What is done is done, but that doesn't mean we shouldn't look closely into what happened and think about ways to fix it because sometimes you get the chance to play again. The telephone system has essentially collapsed into a mess of constant spam calls. All MOQ lacks to replace it is a decent presence spec that presents a set of affordances users of the telephone system can understand. Which implies a naming scheme that is public goods so Alice can give Bob some string he can input into his device to initiate a call with her.
Don't have to do it my way, but I do have an existence proof for a solution.
