You don’t have to pay anything to have your own identity.

If you want someone else’s servers to replicate a piece of information for you, and you want them to take responsibility for administrative issues like figuring out whether you still want it next year or what to do if you’re doing something illegal, you may have to pay anywhere from $5 a year to $30 a year for the privilege depending on a couple of factors. Given how massively inflated the price of registering a domain could be, if the type of ghouls who like to get their hands on things like this were able to get their hands on it, I’m inclined to call that success. About 99% of internet users will never need to know or care about DNS, and they can still have their identity without having to pay $30 a year.

I’m pretty sure the price of domains has actually been going down over time, and they’ve introduced a bunch of new TLDs and new types of entries in the records in response to pretty much the only significant problems that the 40-year-old system has ever had during its history. Like I said, I’d call that success.

You don’t have to! You can run a DNS server out of your house and host any and all domain names you can think of!

Of course, nobody but you will use it, but it’s the principle of the thing, right?