It’s difficult to exaggerate the damage that has been caused to the original vision of the web through the commercialisation of domain names. Imposing artificial scarcity and the complexity of commerce systems on a fundamental identifier makes it orders of magnitude harder to self host. Domain names should be a public good. We should embrace https://www.opennic.org/ in the EU and mandate that all browser vendors implement support and get Let’s Encrypt to provide TLS support.