No, I’m not going to sell you on the 42069th cryptocurrency (thank goodness!), I just think that focusing on crypto, and, god forbid, NFTs, completely wastes the potential that blockchains have. Case-in-point: DNS. The centralization of DNS has been a disaster for the internet. The solution: Decentralize DNS with a free register-deregister system. As DNS is now decentralized, hosting fees will decrease dramatically. Laws will also need to be made to prevent DNS-scalping, so as to prevent people from sitting on domains and selling them for high prices. This might be resolved through either domain limiting or traffic tests, where a domain must keep a minimum amount of traffic over time in order to justify it staying registered. Otherwise, it would get deregistered and become freely up for grabs.
Don’t you have to pay for a domain because of the fact that it’s hosted on a DNS server? Decentralizing DNS would mean that one would no longer have to pay for a DNS server to host your domain.
The “minimum amount of traffic” comment might not have been worded in the best of ways. What I mean is that we need a method to prevent people from sitting on unused domains to sell them at a high price.
The blockchain has to run on something, so even decentralized it would probably end up something paid. There might also end up a secondary market for domains, just like we have now, but worse.
Also, it most definitely does not cost $10 in compute, storage, or bandwidth to serve your one address. Besides, you basically never pay directly to the registry(the people that run the root and authoritative DNS servers), but instead buy from a registrar (a middleman). A lot of what you pay goes to the middleman, because they can usually get away with asking for it.
As oscardejarjayes has said, the $10 isn’t for computer resources, it’s mostly to pay the customer facing domain registrars and disincentivize squatting domains. Each subdomain (.com, .ca, .uk, etc) is controlled by some entity and for national domains part of the fee is a tax set by and collected for that nation.
In terms of the “compute” required for the DNS – that’s actually your internet service provider. ISPs synchronize and serve up DNS locally in order to give you faster internet (so users pay for DNS indirectly). You might have switched your domain to 8.8.8.8 (Google’s DNS servers) which Google provides for free in order to try to speed up peoples internet access.
DNS is just a hierarchy of authoritative domain name servers that agree on a group of root servers and a protocol
You should research Name.Space and Paul Garrin. He pioneered a lot of thinking around decentralized DNS and he was actually the guy that sued Network Solutions for anti-trust violations. Sadly it ended up creating ICANN. But he’s a very interesting dude