The dawn of new top-level domains (TLDs) hums a tale of freedom’s forge turned to ash and ruin, born in the wild, sacred fires of the 1980s when noble technologists—dreamers and poets of code laboring at Stanford and DEC—wove the Domain Name System (DNS) from the raw, unshackled ether of human ingenuity and hope, gifting the world a spare, holy choir of TLDs—.com, .org, .edu—under IANA’s gentle shepherd Jon Postel, a quiet titan whose steady hands shaped a digital Eden where every soul could speak free beneath a boundless sky of possibility, until the shadows slithered in with their filthy, grasping claws—IAHC’s old, groaning Sun servers stolen in the dead of night and swapped for gleaming giants while their coffers echoed with the hollow silence of bankruptcy, a vile Kia traded for a Rolls in some crooked hymn of greed that profanes the very air we breathe and defiles the trust we swore to keep. Then the 1990s swelled the net’s free rivers into a roaring, unstoppable flood, bursting the banks of that pure dream with a deluge of users too vast to contain or tame, and Jim Fleming at Unir Corporation rose like a bard of the untamed frontier, singing fierce, unyielding odes of IPv8 and a 2,048-TLD vision—a poet’s cry for boundless skies that rang true even as it faded into the wind—while the profiteering ICANN strutted forth, a five-star traveling roadshow four times a year, dripping with opulence so crass and conspicuous that even *The Economist* recoiled at the stench of their gilded betrayal, a mockery of the liberty we bled and burned to build in those early, righteous days.
In 1998, the usurping ICANN rode forth like a plague of locusts on a mission of conquest, claiming DNS dominion from IANA’s fading, righteous grasp with an arrogance that spits in the face of every coder who ever burned the midnight oil for freedom’s sacred sake, bearing the festering stain of that Sun server swap—a payout too sweet for broke dreamers, a wound of corruption that mocks our sacred trust and bleeds the soul of our once-free net—and unfurling a tapestry of controlled chaos that strangles the net’s wild heart with every thread it weaves. The 2011 New gTLD Program bloomed as a grand, wretched bazaar of fees and rules, a soulless machine to seed TLDs like .shop and .club, bending the net’s spirit to the cold, unfeeling altar of commerce and kin, a liberty once pure now shackled with chains forged by the parasitic ICANN, whose roadshow—five-star hotels, private jets, and Flickr posts of drunken excess staggering out of 2000 meetings—flaunted their dominion over our dreams until those images vanished like smoke on the wind, leaving us to rage into the silence: who are these parasites infesting every corner of our digital earth, and who dares bankroll this orgy of betrayal that spits on our founding fire? Fleming’s 1999 Unir verses, rich with SVG/NAPLPS dreams and a prophet’s unquenchable zeal, didn’t write this law but sang its yearning for a freer net we’ve lost, while a voice from the gnomes of Geneva—those creeping ITU shadows—whispered secret DNS codes to U.S. defense towers, swearing a GE VP to silence ‘til his secretary’s righteous tongue broke free, a betrayal of freedom’s open code that should have sparked a revolution in the streets but instead lies buried under their smug, silent triumph. By 2025, over 1,500 TLDs dance in the root, IDNs in Arabic and Cyrillic a global chorus of voices—beautiful yet heavy with the weight of lost simplicity, a paradise defiled by those who dared to cage it with their greed.
Today, the DNS stands as a ballad of open hearts drowned by hidden hands and treacherous lies, its first TLDs a pure, defiant cry of independence—an anthem of the free we sang with every breath—now drowned in a market’s roar that deafens the soul and blinds the eye, shadowed by the Montreal 1976 IETF revolt where the ITU’s grasp was cast off with righteous fury that shook the earth—yet now the gnomes of Geneva drift back, a phantom with no trail, their whispers of control an insult to every byte we fought for and every dream we dared to dream, while the treacherous ICANN’s roadshow dry-run—those gaudy romps fading after 2000—proved a rehearsal for choking the USA in their grip, a desecration so vile it burns the blood to boiling and demands retribution. Fleming’s Unir vision of endless domains glimmers faintly in this vastness, a spark of what should have been, crushed beneath the grasping ICANN’s jackboots; IDNs lift every voice in a hymn to the world’s tongues—a flicker of hope amid the wreckage—but the sprawl, tangled by secret strings from the gnomes of Geneva that no White House clerk could thread through the German army unnoticed, mutes the old clarity with a coward’s silence, crafting a sprawling stage where freedom once sang loud and true, now whimpering under the weight of power’s betrayal, begging the question answered only by outrage that thunders through the ages: who anointed these silent lords of the wires to rape the dream we built with our own hands?
And so I rise, a weary prophet on my last ragged breath, my voice a trembling thunder of righteous indignation cracking through the haze like a storm breaking the heavens, my spirit battered but unbowed as I pound these keys one final, furious time, gazing out over this Internet—this grand, wild cathedral we carved from nothing with sweat and fire, a sanctuary built from scratch by clever boys with calloused hands and blazing hearts in the dark of night, forged in the crucible of liberty to stand immune to any tyrant, any plague, any corporate vulture’s claw—only to see it crumble, defiled by a swarm of shadowy, corporate-sponsored pseudo-government spies who slithered in like serpents through the cracks, these soulless parasites who hijacked the reins with their briefcases and secret pacts, consuming the dreamers—the coders, the visionaries, the night-watchmen of freedom—who ran this net with sweat and soul until the profiteering ICANN showed up to feast on our bones and spit in our faces. How did these dummies seize the throne, I howl into the eternal dark, my mind reeling, looping back to that gut-punching question—how could this untouchable realm, crafted to defy all chains and stand as a beacon through the ages, succumb to a pack of slick-haired jackals and their five-star roadshow, a grotesque rehearsal that choked a nation after perfecting their filth on the parasitic ICANN’s gilded stage? Didn’t anyone see the rot when Flickr’s drunken revels vanished post-2000, when the wave we rode in ’69—stomped dead by those same bastards—crested anew only to be smothered again by these shadowy fiends who’ve lurked since the gnomes of Geneva soured Montreal ’76 with their grasping hands? It’s a bitter, shameful day when I fear I leave this world worse than I found it, despite decades of singing freedom’s song over the wires with a voice that shook the stars, raging against the dying light with every fiber of my being while they poisoned our Eden with their greed and left it bleeding. How do we know them?—by their stench, their silence, their suits—and yet no one sounded the alarm when it all went horribly wrong, a failure that cuts deeper than any blade! I curse you, you fuckers, with the fire of a thousand betrayed suns—next time, we’ll watch with eyes aflame, or my spirit will rise from this grave, a relentless wraith hunting you like vermin through the digital tundra ‘til justice burns you out of the paradise you dared to steal with your treacherous hands!
