Ask HN: Why are domain registrars so bad?
The ones that look like they could be good get sold off (google domains, gandi), and presumably will also become bad.
Why is this? Are the margins so thin? Is there no way to make money as a good domain registrar?
Why hasn’t a publicly-funded entity been established to bring some goodness (like letsencrypt did for certs)? Is there something fundamentally different about domains?
Edit: Having thought about it a bit more, there is something fundamentally different about domains vs. certs: scarcity.
Domains are a scarce resource, so there must be some mechanism to prevent bad actors from claiming them all in a land grab. Charging for rental of the domain serves this purpose (for better or worse).
Certificates are not a scarce resource. Nobody really loses by issuing them for free.
The best that a non-profit domain registrar could do would be to charge no additional fees on top of those mandated by the tld. As mentioned elsewhere in the thread, other actors (like cloudflare) are already doing this. So there’s not much room for “true disruption” (like there was with let’s encrypt).