Death & Domains

A recent piece on “forever domains” sparked bigger questions about permanence online: when domain owners die out, do we need new systems that don't rely on domains at all?

Should domains last forever? That’s not a new question for me, but it’s one that I’ve been thinking more about lately, especially since I ended up writing a story recently that posed this exact question.

Over at the new publication GraveSite, which covers the concept of death and grief with a reporter’s eye, I posed a question I’ve thought a lot about over the years: How can you keep a person’s digital identity alive even if their physical identity is long gone? For corporate entities this is actually reasonably easy—succession plans and all that, ensuring someone is paying the bills long-term.

But people aren‘t corporations, and business structures like domain registrars and web hosts often treat us as consumers. Which means that when we aren’t around to consume, and to pay money in exchange for that consumption, we’re going to be the first to lose our digital plot in the ground. There’s no internet cemetery, and we have a relatively limited number of archives that can hold our digital histories.

Which means that, when we go offline, so will our digital identities, eventually. It’ll take longer, but that credit card isn’t going to pay for itself. If you’re a writer or creative, this is a real risk, and the answers for solving this simply aren’t very good.

My piece goes over some of the novel solutions out there, including a nonprofit initiative to essentially take ownership of websites and pay the bills in your absence.

I’m happy with the piece, but don’t want to spoil it, so I’ll simply encourage you to read. But I wanted to spend a second thinking about a the second-order effects of this: If domains last forever, at what point do we need to start over?

This was an argument I heard from a couple of readers about this topic. There’s a finite number of domains—at what point are the domains already here going to crowd out people that left a long time ago. I own the domain erniesmith.net that I use to promote my freelance work; if I decided to sell it to a service that aims to keep a domain around “forever,” am I screwing over later generations of Ernie Smiths?

It’s hard to say, but I do think it speaks to a longer-term architecture problem that the internet will eventually face, a crossroads as our domain owners die out, the domain maybe not being relevant anymore but their websites certainly having some value. And maybe the solution to this problem is to create new systems for distributing information online that don’t necessarily rely on domains.

One commenter on my post, Alex Russell (a former Google Chrome engineer now working on Microsoft Edge), pointed to the idea of Web Packages, a concept where websites could be distributed in full without the need for any attached domain or even expected online access.

It was an idea that originated with the Chrome team, but found little to no uptake with other browser-makers, eventually falling into the abyss of Web standards obscurities. (The project currently lives with the Web Incubator Community Group (WICG).) It arguably deserves to be revisited as the problem of dead websites and dead owners becomes a bigger problem. For one thing, it helps to resolve some of the bigger, more annoying problems with old websites—that they’re often required to be static when they’ve fallen into disuse, that they often don’t support https like modern sites do, and that they can carry latent security issues, much like how an old book can grow dust and mold if not managed properly. (In fact, one of the listed uses for web packages is to create an easy-to-distribute format for researching security exploits.)

Should the domain system itself be seen as temporary? Should we treat old websites more like books whose volumes can be picked up at will when all is said and done? That’s a provocative idea, and one that I think deserves more discussion in the current climate.

But one thing I’ll say is that our system is completely upside down if your website stands a better chance of being around in 100 years if it’s a Facebook profile or a forgotten Blogger or LiveJournal site than if you put in the work to carefully put it on the internet yourself.

Anyway, I look forward to talking about these issues with the GraveSite team on October 27, when I’ll be taking part in their HellFireside Chat on digital death. If this topic at all appeals to you, hope to see you there.

Domain-Free Links

As the Mullenweg turns: Get ready for some drama, folks. Fortune has a feature explaining what, exactly, happened with Matt Mullenweg last month when he very briefly was booted from his CEO role with Automattic. As you might guess, it has to do with the ongoing WP Engine mess.

A quick shout-out to friend of Tedium Sean Malseed, a.k.a. Action Retro, who publicly discussed his health issues with his audience. That stuff isn’t fun, and he’s not all the way through it, but I’m glad he’s still with us. After all, someone needs to put Haiku on a toaster, and I’d prefer if he did it.

Tying to my prior discussion of ArtCraft, I think that the rising trend of reverse engineering of technology you already own is a good thing, especially when it counters ugly corporate practices. Smart TVs, as highlighted by 404 Media, are an excellent starting point here.

--

Thanks to the team at GraveSite for letting me write about this important issue. (You should definitely if the topic of death is one that you find interesting.) Wanna share this piece? Here’s a quick link.

By the way, we just gave the Tedium Shopping Network an infusion of fresh products. Curious? Give it a look.

Top imaga via Depositphotos.com