TTL 34
Good Morfternight friends,
The internet wasn’t supposed to be a feed, a walled garden or a series of apps.
Actually, it started with names. Names that pointed to people, places, ideas, names you could own, configure and keep.
More precisely, what we call domain name.
Today, that logic still exists. It’s just buried under algorithm-chasing, third-party platforms, and short-term thinking.
But if we dust that off, we might rediscover something useful: a way to make the web feel like ours again.
Let’s talk numbers
In 2024 alone, 120 million new domain names were registered, and twice as many renewed.
The domain name industry generated over $2.5 billion in revenue.
Verisign alone—managing .com and .net—made $402 million in a single quarter.
Sounds healthy, but let’s dig deeper.
By the end of 2024, there were about 5.5 billion people online worldwide and 360 million registered domain names.
Considering that:
- the vast majority of users own 0 domains
- among domain owners, most have just one and a few own many
we could round it off and say that, on average, every domain owner has 2 domains.
That means just 3.2% of internet users actually own one, and that number hasn’t changed much in years.
What went wrong?
I think the incentives have been backwards.
Instead of asking how to help more people own a piece of the web, we focused on how to drive them to consume more conten.
We built short-term platforms, locked users in, and called it innovation.
We abandoned the promise of easy access to creation, for a focus on consumption, and along the way catered to “influencers”, not to everyday people trying to build something of their own.
So we keep selling more to the same few, in a zero-sum game that shrinks the vision instead of growing the market.
This isn’t a growth problem. It’s a vision problem.
Because if everyone uses domains but only 3% own one, we’re not just missing a market—we’re missing the point.
What domains could become—if we stop thinking short-term
Every domain is a pointer in a distributed database. It’s already mapped to servers, email, metadata. You can control it, move it, configure it—no platform’s permission required.
So, in theory, your domain could be much more than a web address—it could be your login, your wallet, your resume, your portfolio, your proof of presence. Think about what that could mean for digital identities!
All of this is great, but we’ve done a terrible job of showing people that.
And the result is a system with enormous potential that still feels like a confusing, abstract purchase to most people.
If we want this market to grow, the answer isn’t more promo codes or flash sales—it’s more people who actually understand what they’re buying.
That means starting with the basics: education, clarity, and tools built for humans—not just developers.
A shift in mindset
What would it look like to take domains seriously as identity infrastructure?
- Make it simpler to connect a domain to services you already use
- Standardize identity records (think: a public profile, or contact card)
- Design tools for real people, not just sysadmins
- Treat the domain not as a site to be visited, but as a person to be found
And above all— build for the long term.
DNS is already one of the most resilient systems on the internet and it’s been running for decades, so we already have the infrastructure.
What’s missing is putting our big ideas into action.
That’s it for today, see you next week.
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I also publish on paolo.blog and monochrome.blog.
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