Now here is a controversial question... Can we have a free of cost top level domain? What are the actual costs associated with registering a domain? If let's encrypt can provide secure certificates free of cost, why can't a different no profit provide domains free of cost as well? It doesn't have to be pretty. It could be a UUID v7 stacked on top of another UUID v7 for all I care but it would be globally unique and available free of cost.
And once you go to the site, your browser will remember it anyway so you don't need to type the monstrosity.
A free of cost TLD is probably not practical. There are some special things that go along with being a TLD and being in the public suffix list: https://github.com/publicsuffix/list
If you drop the TLD part though, you can do whatever you want with any domain you want, up to and including handing out free subdomains to anyone who asks. As usual, though, if you try to do this, the dark internet will make you regret it as one day, quite suddenly, you'd find you were hosting the DNS of some massive scam email or other, or any of who-can-even-enumerate ways of making you sorry you put this service up because of their abuse of it. Just like anyone can make a URL redirector, and many people even use it as a sort of "learn this language project" but if you actually put it up online you will rapidly regret it.
It's a bummer and I'm not celebrating this fact, but, yeah, it's not something you want to do.
Because .onion isn't a DNS domain. It uses the same syntax but you have to be on Tor for it to work and it does something completely different than DNS resolution. I read the original question as specifically about having top-level domains, not "something like domains that works on a special network".
Special networks can do as they like, but then they won't be DNS.
> It doesn't have to be pretty. It could be a UUID v7 stacked on top of another UUID v7 for all I care but it would be globally unique and available free of cost.
> It could be a UUID v7 stacked on top of another UUID v7 for all I care but it would be globally unique and available free of cost.
You're essentially talking about IPv6 addresses.
Interestingly, most residential ISPs these days already issue your home network an IPv6 /64 or better! But they (sadly) just firewall off use of most ports that residential users have no purpose for — on my own network, even if I configure my router to allocate each machine on the network a public-routable IPv6 address, the only port the network (not the router!) is willing to allow non-established incoming flows to is 22/tcp.
But even if they worked, they'd still be ephemeral. At best, even if your ISP keeps the allocation the same, you'd lose it if/when you switch ISPs. (Similar problem to ISP email addresses.)
The real key here, would be if someone was freely giving out tiny slices of IPv6 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Provider-independent_address_s... to individuals; and there were hosting providers / residential ISPs willing to add BGP routes in their ASN for these tiny prefixes. Then you could have a stable and portable and free IPv6 address for life. (It's certainly possible in theory, just not built yet — similar to how LetsEncrypt was "certainly possible in theory, just not built yet" until it was built.)
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That being said, if you really want this to be DNS (not sure why; if it's not a short memorable name [and thus inherently competed over by typosquatters], then DNS is the wrong tool for the job), then you could do what systems like ngrok do, but directly serving those dynamic records as domains under its own gTLD, rather than serving them as subdomains under a domain. Maybe with each domain getting its own DNS zone and everything. That'd certainly be neat.
Note that way back when, the .me ccTLD sort of did this — they gave away .me "domains" for "free"; but with all web traffic on those "free" domains being intermediated by their L7 reverse-proxy servers, where they'd inject ads into any delivered HTML pages.
.tk was widely known for taking back domains once they got popular and turning them into ad spam. That's how they made money "giving" the domains away for free: lead generation, basically.
There was a .FREE initiative but that got all weird after a while, the deadlines were not respected and then nothing happened... https://icannwiki.org/.free
Another thing, the thing that you mention is really similar to how tor onion links work... Except they offer encryption and prevents MITM/any other ways while still having your ip hidden.
Another idea which I use sometimes is to use something like cloudflare tunnels or ssh forwarding with things like serveo.net or any ssh based remote forwarding in general like pinggy or even ngrok.
If you are using this in some internal thing, I can also suggest something like piping server which I really like and I want to build something like a web browser tor-onion links esque but on top of piping server, its really really cool
running a domain costs money. there's no way around that - it requires server resources to respond to dns queries, and that requires servers and electricity.
so to offer it for free means somebody has to subsidize it. letsencrypt can operate because big companies with lots of money want their ads to be delivered without being intercepted by an ISP. what's the motivation for anybody to subsidize free domains?
> running a domain costs money. there's no way around that - it requires server resources to respond to dns queries, and that requires servers and electricity.
I guarantee you I can store and make available over DNS the less than 1 KiB of data for less than a penny a year.
Instead of free, charge a flat $1, put it in long term US treasuries at 5% / TIPS at 2.5% and you’ve covered your hosting costs forever. The principle will never need to be touched.
okay, so why aren't you doing that. if you can offer domains for $1, you can undercut all the existing players by a huge margin. that's a big opportunity, no?
I might not be fully understanding the idea, but the difference here is that a let's encrypt certificate can be generated on the fly. domains are considered branding, and getting a 5 letter domain nowadays is impossible. The cost here is that you're renting a domain that others might want aswell, people don't really want your LE cert
X lets people own a 5 letter username for free. Renting names is not even industry standard for platforms. It seems like it's only DNS that charges for names.
And once you go to the site, your browser will remember it anyway so you don't need to type the monstrosity.
Or is it a really bad idea™?