I am rather pessimistic about that. Large aggregator services will continue to dissolve and depersonalize small players, who have no other choice but to dance to their tune. You either sell on Amazon or almost don't sell at all. So we buy from this small seller on Amazon and really do not even care about their name, we choose a hotel on Booking to barely remember it after the travel is over. Its getting harder and harder for small businesses to stand up to the challenge of technical superiority of large brands which employ hundreds of top engineers and designers, while the complexity of technology behind the digital experience continues to grow.
Your point is excellent,
@Don Gondon and my prediction re personalized domains vs people placing their content on Facebook, shared craft sales, etc. large sites was probably more a hope than a realistic expectation.
Thinking about what you have written, I think many of us feel sort of pulled two ways. We like to support small initiatives but we also like the comfort of some big entity, like Amazon or Ebay, being involved so if things go south we can ask for redress.
I sense, particularly in people of say 25 and under, somewhat a backlash against big corporations in general and particularly them having private data or content. The planned manipulation of social converse for political, economic and social purposes, with fake profiles and organized misinformation, has further weakened support for existing products in many minds.
So I think the time is ripe, if someone can really come up with a turnkey solution that will give them control but still be easy and fairly low cost. But most well placed to facilitate that are themselves a big corporation, so .....
It is like if something like Wikipedia could get traction that was a network of private sites, but each private site on its own domain would totally own its data and control the interactions (like who could see its products, what was shared publicly, etc.). It would have to be flexible in supporting blogs, creative product sharing, cross comments, instant communication, etc. It would allow side gig selling of products and services, as well as authentic reviews. I suppose it would be a modern version of what MySpace set out to do decades ago for musicians, etc.
Even IF it happened, would it influence domain market? Not sure. Most people would definitely hand register. But I can see enough entertainers, serious side gig, influencers, athletes, etc. wanting something a bit better that there would be a market at least upper $$$ to mid $$$$. Let's say if the idea really took off and 1 in 10 people got their own site. That is like 600 million domain names, more than all registered now. Let's say 1 in 60 would get a $$$ name and 1 in 2000 a $$$$ name. That would be 10 million sales of $$$ names and 300,000 $$$$ sales. Probably dream numbers.
How might it happen? I think some sort of promotion aimed at young people is where it would start. A registry would sell long term (say 5 year) registrations at near cost to those who met some qualification (say still in college or university, etc.).
They would also kick in funds to some nonprofit that would control the network and be run as a strictly nonprofit NGO. Always. The .org business if it goes through may damage people's faith in such agreements.
Some players would offer hosting tailored exactly to this service to ensure standardization at incredibly low costs. That is there would be a simple turnkey system that you just point your DNS and off the bat after saying what features you want (blog, review, communication, store, resume, etc.) you would be up and running. It would have some sort of verification so we would know people on it were indeed real people. They would control who could interact with their "feed" etc. They would own everything on their domain name.
By the way
@Michael Cyger floated a somewhat similar idea, can't remember if I saw it on Twitter or somewhere else, some time ago.
The .me registry tried something aimed to young people, but it was essentially just a domain name. Some NGO needs to make the turnkey solution and offer it and hosting very near cost, not just year one.
Sorry this got so long.
Bob
