Wouldn’t it be cool if everyone had a domain name that they could use for emails, websites and more without being locked into a specific provider?
No longer would you see @gmail.com and .substack.com everywhere - if people had control over their domains then they could easily move to between providers or platforms easily without anyone even noticing.
I think two of the common reasons why not many people have domain names is that it seems complicated and costs money. What if we could change this?
Every UK resident could be entitled to one free domain name. It would be a subdomain of .uk (don’t ask me to name it, I’m terrible at naming things). Kids could be encouraged to set it up in school IT classes and use it for email and websites.
Is this feasible?
Obviously this would all cost something - surely it can’t be that much? According to the public reports from Nominet, the non-profit that runs the .uk domain and many of its subdomains, they spent £50.4m administering 10.2 million domains in 2025 (including DNS). This means that they spent £4.84 per domain last year.
I must admit that I hadn’t calculated the unit cost until I got this far and that is higher that I thought it would be. I’m charged a little more than this for my domain but I assumed that they were making higher margins.
There are 69.5 million people in the UK and if they all got a free domain name it would cost £340m. It’s still minuscule as a percentage of GDP but there are probably better things to do with that magnitude of money.
Unfortunately it seems like my great plan wasn’t so great after all.
I think this shows that those that are lucky enough to (like me) have a domain name, or even several, should remember how much of a privilege it is. This should also be kept in mind when trying to improve the internet - we can’t expect everyone to get a domain name.
If anyone knows why it is so expensive I would be interested in hearing.