So let's say you own a restaurant joint. Bob's Asian takeaway.
You enter your phone number and opening hours; phone number 123-45-789, open 12.00 - 22.00, mon - sun
One day the phone goes suspiciously quiet. A customer stops by your shop, and orders something. He mentions that he tried calling, but the number he got on google must've been wrong because some automated robot message.
You decide to google your own restaurant, and sure enough, the phone number that shows up is 800-00-123. But your keen eye also spots that the link to the restaurant isn't www.bobsasiantakeaway.com, but rather www.bobsasiantakeaway-food.com
Any way you try to search, the top results only point to that website, phone number, google maps location, etc.
Suddenly a sales rep from some company calls you, and offers you a deal - if you pay [x€ month], they will help with increasing your sales. You say OK, I'll try.
Not too long after, calls and orders start coming in a before. You try to call 800-00-123 from your private cellphone, and sure enough - the phone at work starts ringing. You click on the link www.bobsasiantakeaway-food.com, and you're redirected to www.bobsasiantakeaway.com
If you stop the payments, no more phone calls and no web traffic.
You change the name of your restaurant? A new version of the above pops up immediately. You report it to the relevant authorities, but you're told it could take months and months for them to look at your case...you can't survive 6 months with minimum sales.
For some unfortunate small fish, that's sort of how it works.
Then you may take a less generic name and trademark it (USD 400 ?). This should put a stop from it, at least using it in a domain name for food.
"Bobs Fusion Cuisine"
I am not in the food industry. But after having read this, this would be definitely something I would consider. But maybe too much for a Mom and Pop shop. In fact, I have found Mom and Pop shops extremely difficult to do business with.
Anecdata: my neighbour runs a doggy day care. She's been flooded with 1 star reviews (clearly not from her customers), and received similar coercive phones calls to help her improve her online presence. Not much she can do about it, as Google is not particularly responsive
Just to add this to make it more clear: GrubHub used to belong to the same company as Lieferando, and was only sold at the end of 2024. So in a way this comment is more a "yes, they did it in the US as well".
Agreed. Search engine results is what gives a domain name credibility.
EU has been going hard on "gatekeepers" recently. Good regulation could fix this. E.g. make Google verify each address by sending the business a form in a self-addressed, stamped envelope.
Back in the days Google verified businesses by sending a postcard to the address you have created your business at. The postcard had a verification code which you’d need to enter. Sometimes you'd also had to revalidate the adress ownership every now and then.
Unfortunately they do not seem to be doing this anymore.
Physical mail, too, is a source of gatekeeping and bureaucracy. It is labour-intensive, expensive, and you are trading your false positive rate of digital impostors for a false negative rate of legitimate businesses struggling with unreliable mail delivery.
I doubt they go out of their way to pretend to be the restaurants they target. That would make for a very quick and easy fraud case.
It'd be much safer if Google were to just take the first plausible website for truth unless proven otherwise, and the first plausible website happens to be the one Lieferando registers.
If Google were a responsible company, this wouldn't even be possible. You'd need to enter something they send you over the physical mail to verify that you do indeed do business from a specific address. From there on you'd be able to verify the phone number as well. Google's tendency to display scraped data as facts is what empowers companies like Just Eat Takeaway/Lieferando/Thuisbezorgd in their abuse.
> but also claim the Google Maps listing using the website.
And they may even comply with "Delivery-only food brands" policy [0] of Google Business Profile.
Although I think their strategy it is stepping on thin ice and risking ban, including search index ban of the main domain.
Slightly tangential, and this might be controversial, but hear me out.
I think we need an alternative to DNS as we know it. Here in India, millions of successful business owners have never heard of DNS. They run profitable enterprises entirely through WhatsApp and use social media pages for their marketing presence.
The reason is straightforward: social media platforms have made it incredibly easy to establish an online presence. These entrepreneurs don't care about domain ownership – an Instagram profile with substantial followers represents real business success to them.
This pattern extends globally. Remember when celebrities maintained their own websites a decade ago? Today, most have abandoned personal sites in favor of social media followings in the millions.
The traditional website + DNS model is simply too complex for most people, so they gravitate toward walled gardens. While this creates platform dependency issues, it also reveals a fundamental UX problem with how we've structured the web's addressing system.
Perhaps we need to rethink discoverability and identity on the internet in ways that are more intuitive for ordinary users, rather than expecting everyone to become amateur system administrators.
In other words, it would be enough for the chamber of commerce to offer a one-page-per-company index. Pre-populated automatically with all the legally binding contact information and offer a field or two where the company can put their Instagram-like profiles with lots of pictures. And allow people to comment on them.
One of the nice things in DACH (Germany, Austria and Switzerland) is the obligation to put an imprint on the website [0]. This is valid for every hosted site which runs commercially (even if it is a private blog displaying ads).
They must show a phone number, an email address which must be usable as a customer support email (even if it is just named info@...), physical address, who is in charge of the company and other things.
Whenever I try to find out whom a website offering some "new AI stuff" belongs to, I'm baffled to see that other countries don't require this.
I have a mildly entertaining story for you! We have something just a little like this in Viet Nam.
It's designed as a public good that lets you look up businesses by their tax ID. It's mandatory for the company owner to put their phone number and address there. The address is periodically verified by an actual person. It gets scraped heavily, and inserted into a whole sub-genre of similar websites with mostly identical features but with faster and better search. I've even seen people print it out to make "phone books" that are sold at trade shows!
As you might expect, the resulting increase in (fairly sophisticated) scam calls makes me unlikely to pick up my phone. So I'm not actually reachable there with a call, but I might get a text! For my websites, registrar info for those ties in to the system above using digital signatures. So using only a domain name, you get the company license, a theoretically valid phone number, and a very probably correct address.
It's a mix of good and bad, but overall I really like the system. Looking up other companies before doing business with them has saved me and my colleagues from a number of bad deals, e.g. not the real company owner, or misrepresentation of the scope of their company license.
I think it's a terrible idea to put your entire business in the hands of big tech companies who will take it away at the first sight of something they don't like with zero (legal or otherwise) recourse, sometimes in an entirely automated manner. Like it or not, ICANN and the DNS system remains mostly-neutral as it should be (even though Tier1 ISPs can be easily pressured into dropping/blackholing by activists, and some of them are activists themselves).
Isn't that the idea behind an alternative to DNS? I think OP meant that we need a similar system based on clear rules and international cooperation for social media, in addition to host names.
> ICANN and the DNS system remains mostly-neutral as it should be
With emphasis on mostly. I believe most of the issues we have with DNS and name allocation could be solved if they were managed by an actual international non-profit organization. Alas, ICANN is an American for-profit company, whose corruption needs no more evidence.
AOL keywords? The benefit of DNS is that it's also sort of able to segment out globally, though that mostly works for smaller companies.
In many ways Google took over the role of DNS for non-technical people, but it's a little hard to advertise a specific search term. It is still possible to have a business without a domain name, but for e.g. WhatsApp, or Telegram, you're putting yourself into a garden with a wall high enough that even Google can't find you.
I have seem more and more companies simply advertise their Facebook or Instagram pages, but that sort of excludes a number of people from their business. Relying on WhatsApp would yield much the same problem.
On solution I could see, at least in some countries, is to have the government provide a "landing page" for each company when they register for their business licens. So you'd get tims-trash-removable.business.com when you register your company and you can then put in links to WhatsApp, Facebook, Instagram, email or a phone number.
Introducing something completely new would be extremely hard.
This is an interesting take on the current situation, and I definitely see it here in Portugal. Lots of businesses with signs with only a WhatsApp number and a QR code for payment (MBWay). This said, it seems like any system for discovery will have technical hurdles (a registration process, a way to apply updates, renewals, validation, etc). I agree that the landscape is changing, but it feels very challenging to establish an alternative to something like DNS without a lot of the same hurdles that come with it today. I would like to hear your perspective on what this would look like.
Social media platforms aren't the answer, they're the crutch. What you've described tells me it needs to be more straightforward to establish and grow your online presence on a foundation you control (or at least one where the owner has some true accountability to you).
But you still get the same problem, no? Limited good WhatsApp handles. Just domains are older, more common internationally and have had longer to be hoarded.
WhatsApp doesn't have handles. Only phone numbers. You print the phone number on a big sign on the front of your business, underneath the name of the business. If your phone number changes, you get a new sign or paint over it.
The argument that DNS is too hard doesn't really appeal to me. There are a billion and one WYSIWYG websites that let you register a domain and host some static site on it, all from one convenient web interface. I see loads of adverts all over the place for things like Squarespace and Wix. There's nothing hard to grasp about DNS if you offer it to users in an intuitive way. I imagine if Meta gave users a button that let them rent out a domain and have it redirect to their Facebook page, then many would take it up. There are a lot of people already using services like linktr.ee, so I can imagine a market for tying that page to a domain.
I think the biggest issue is that people have just gotten used to putting @MY_BUSINESS_NAME in their advertising and it's what most users know how to deal with. I reckon most users have never manually typed a URL into the address bar in their lives.
As long as only a minority of businesses lose their access to WhatsApp, they'll just be outcompeted by ones who follow Facebook's law over India's law.
I doubt there's much need for long-term number stability in the type of business that prints a number on its sign out the front, anyway. If it does change, you could go back to the business and read the sign again.
With the acknowledgment that it’s a controversial opinion, I think the most important ‘domain’ tied to our identity is our appearance, most importantly our face. I’ve been advocating for a time that we need to think about a ‘DNS’ that, in discrete, decentralized, decoupled steps, goes from the appearance of real-world things to meaning/language to links to digital things.
That seems like a difficult problem to solve if "not having a real website" isn't stigmatized (it totally is as far as I'm concerned).
There are hosters that offer a domain + some kind of pre-baked website for like 2-3€ a month, but that's still not free (especially in India) and still not as easy as some social media page / account. Nevertheless, these offerings could be much better and cheaper, especially if there was a reasonably official looking TLD where it's dirt cheap to register a domain name. But is there a business model there? :/
Thinking of IPFS, maybe we shouldn’t refer to content by name and location at once.
Perhaps every business gets a UUID, and that’s the official online ID for that business. Link it to a name only for display (or a list of names, for multiple languages). Now there is the question of how to bind that to a location (IP) online as well as IRL. Maybe a map of business with their UUID maintained by governments based on the post office system to validate it IRL?
The issue with DNS isn't that it's too complex; from a purely technical standpoint, it's a fairly simple technology, no more complicated than email, or http. People have created all kinds of abstractions over technology to make it accessible over time. An instagram handle hides a mindbogglingly large amount of complexity going on underneath, and people find that simple enough.
It's the administrative part that makes it hard: The registration, the expiration, the distributed responsibility of needing a NIC, registrar, DNS operator, hosting platform, Certificate Authority—we're all used to the bullshit, but getting from "I'd like to present my business under this domain" to presenting your business under this domain requires way too much bureaucracy.
The whole process is still stuck in the 90ies: It shouldn't require more than picking a name and providing payment details to get running. Delegation of anything could happen easily via OAuth grants; TLS should just work, given ACME; all other details can be customised if necessary, but normal users should never have to bother with DNS records at all.
Maybe we should register social media handles into the DNS. Then you can advertise your domain and smoothly transition to them. Not exactly solving this, but handles are equally important than web server ip addressses or mail exchange ip addresses.
> The traditional website + DNS model is simply too complex for most people
You assume that business owners should do this themselves, but why? It's very cheap to get a contractor to make you a good website, so that's what business owners should do: contract somebody to do it. That's what business owners also do for signage, print promotion, accounting, machine maintenance, etc.
Most things except for breathing i too complex for most people, including for business owners. That's why there's business-to-business professional services.
This is such a weird take. This is not a problem per se on the technical level.
> Perhaps we need to rethink discoverability and identity on the internet in ways that are more intuitive for ordinary users
Isn't this why search engines became popular in the first place? Because they "solved" discoverability? And before Instagram and WhatsApp existed, they worked fine.
Isn't the reason businesses moved to Instagram and WhatsApp is because people moved to those services? and not the other way around.
To all the folks saying this is a terrible idea and you shouldn't put your trust in big tech companies: you're absolutely right but also wrong.
This is just one of things that "works" and you can't really get around. Tangentially related but one of my friends started a photo booth rental business and was asking me about how to build his web presence. At first he suggested a website and I told him he should have a website but I also told him that an solid Instagram account (we are in the US) would work just as well.
Is it batshit crazy on a conceptual level to get into bed with a big tech company for your web presence? Yeah it absolutely is. But does it actually work and is the most likely way for you to drive sales? Yeah it absolutely is.
Lieferando should spend more time building a good app instead of registering domains. In my experience, they are by far the worst delivery service in Berlin . They’ve also operated long before Uber Eats, Wolt, etc. The only thing they have going for them is some mindshare as the first in the market. I can't understand how they're still around.
You can always guess how shady a company is, if by looking at the whole web site...there is no mention easily found anywhere of who the directors or management team are.
You have to follow the track to their owner who ultimately is nothing more than some Dutch managers saved of their mismanagement by a buddy Dutch Investment fund ....owned by a South African base...that is a front end to Chinese investments via Tencent Holdings...
But hey...they have a Ethics hotline and can think of multiple ethnics violations to report here:
Readit News
You enter your phone number and opening hours; phone number 123-45-789, open 12.00 - 22.00, mon - sun
One day the phone goes suspiciously quiet. A customer stops by your shop, and orders something. He mentions that he tried calling, but the number he got on google must've been wrong because some automated robot message.
You decide to google your own restaurant, and sure enough, the phone number that shows up is 800-00-123. But your keen eye also spots that the link to the restaurant isn't www.bobsasiantakeaway.com, but rather www.bobsasiantakeaway-food.com
Any way you try to search, the top results only point to that website, phone number, google maps location, etc.
Suddenly a sales rep from some company calls you, and offers you a deal - if you pay [x€ month], they will help with increasing your sales. You say OK, I'll try.
Not too long after, calls and orders start coming in a before. You try to call 800-00-123 from your private cellphone, and sure enough - the phone at work starts ringing. You click on the link www.bobsasiantakeaway-food.com, and you're redirected to www.bobsasiantakeaway.com
If you stop the payments, no more phone calls and no web traffic.
You change the name of your restaurant? A new version of the above pops up immediately. You report it to the relevant authorities, but you're told it could take months and months for them to look at your case...you can't survive 6 months with minimum sales.
For some unfortunate small fish, that's sort of how it works.
"Bobs Fusion Cuisine"
I am not in the food industry. But after having read this, this would be definitely something I would consider. But maybe too much for a Mom and Pop shop. In fact, I have found Mom and Pop shops extremely difficult to do business with.
Up to 23,000 domains [1], and listed some restaurants on Google Maps without their permission [2]
[1] https://www.businessinsider.com/grubhub-registered-23000-dom...
[2] https://www.wired.com/story/ghost-kitchens-mystery-grubhub-l...
GrubHub was purchased from Thuisbezorgd.nl (Dutch) by Wonder Group (Marc Lore) a few months ago.
And then go on to extort the restaurants for $$$ to add their correct contact details on the listing.
EU has been going hard on "gatekeepers" recently. Good regulation could fix this. E.g. make Google verify each address by sending the business a form in a self-addressed, stamped envelope.
But they never actually did as far as I know, unless one of my colleagues handled it without telling me.
It'd be much safer if Google were to just take the first plausible website for truth unless proven otherwise, and the first plausible website happens to be the one Lieferando registers.
If Google were a responsible company, this wouldn't even be possible. You'd need to enter something they send you over the physical mail to verify that you do indeed do business from a specific address. From there on you'd be able to verify the phone number as well. Google's tendency to display scraped data as facts is what empowers companies like Just Eat Takeaway/Lieferando/Thuisbezorgd in their abuse.
And they may even comply with "Delivery-only food brands" policy [0] of Google Business Profile. Although I think their strategy it is stepping on thin ice and risking ban, including search index ban of the main domain.
[0] https://support.google.com/business/answer/3038177?sjid=1244...
Not removing the address from their delivery listings seems like a straight-up violation of Google's policy.
I think we need an alternative to DNS as we know it. Here in India, millions of successful business owners have never heard of DNS. They run profitable enterprises entirely through WhatsApp and use social media pages for their marketing presence.
The reason is straightforward: social media platforms have made it incredibly easy to establish an online presence. These entrepreneurs don't care about domain ownership – an Instagram profile with substantial followers represents real business success to them.
This pattern extends globally. Remember when celebrities maintained their own websites a decade ago? Today, most have abandoned personal sites in favor of social media followings in the millions.
The traditional website + DNS model is simply too complex for most people, so they gravitate toward walled gardens. While this creates platform dependency issues, it also reveals a fundamental UX problem with how we've structured the web's addressing system.
Perhaps we need to rethink discoverability and identity on the internet in ways that are more intuitive for ordinary users, rather than expecting everyone to become amateur system administrators.
One of the nice things in DACH (Germany, Austria and Switzerland) is the obligation to put an imprint on the website [0]. This is valid for every hosted site which runs commercially (even if it is a private blog displaying ads).
They must show a phone number, an email address which must be usable as a customer support email (even if it is just named info@...), physical address, who is in charge of the company and other things.
Whenever I try to find out whom a website offering some "new AI stuff" belongs to, I'm baffled to see that other countries don't require this.
[0] https://www.porsche.com/germany/legal-notice/
It's designed as a public good that lets you look up businesses by their tax ID. It's mandatory for the company owner to put their phone number and address there. The address is periodically verified by an actual person. It gets scraped heavily, and inserted into a whole sub-genre of similar websites with mostly identical features but with faster and better search. I've even seen people print it out to make "phone books" that are sold at trade shows!
As you might expect, the resulting increase in (fairly sophisticated) scam calls makes me unlikely to pick up my phone. So I'm not actually reachable there with a call, but I might get a text! For my websites, registrar info for those ties in to the system above using digital signatures. So using only a domain name, you get the company license, a theoretically valid phone number, and a very probably correct address.
It's a mix of good and bad, but overall I really like the system. Looking up other companies before doing business with them has saved me and my colleagues from a number of bad deals, e.g. not the real company owner, or misrepresentation of the scope of their company license.
You, me and entire HN is aware of this but who is going to educate millions of people who are already dependent on these services.
With emphasis on mostly. I believe most of the issues we have with DNS and name allocation could be solved if they were managed by an actual international non-profit organization. Alas, ICANN is an American for-profit company, whose corruption needs no more evidence.
Deleted Comment
Dead Comment
In many ways Google took over the role of DNS for non-technical people, but it's a little hard to advertise a specific search term. It is still possible to have a business without a domain name, but for e.g. WhatsApp, or Telegram, you're putting yourself into a garden with a wall high enough that even Google can't find you.
I have seem more and more companies simply advertise their Facebook or Instagram pages, but that sort of excludes a number of people from their business. Relying on WhatsApp would yield much the same problem.
On solution I could see, at least in some countries, is to have the government provide a "landing page" for each company when they register for their business licens. So you'd get tims-trash-removable.business.com when you register your company and you can then put in links to WhatsApp, Facebook, Instagram, email or a phone number.
Introducing something completely new would be extremely hard.
Dead Comment
I think the biggest issue is that people have just gotten used to putting @MY_BUSINESS_NAME in their advertising and it's what most users know how to deal with. I reckon most users have never manually typed a URL into the address bar in their lives.
Yes. Until they lose their SNS handle for whatever reason and then they find out what some of them actually do care.
I doubt there's much need for long-term number stability in the type of business that prints a number on its sign out the front, anyway. If it does change, you could go back to the business and read the sign again.
I’ve also written a little speculative fiction about what that might look like. https://open.substack.com/pub/noahnorman/p/all-the-kinds-of-...
There are hosters that offer a domain + some kind of pre-baked website for like 2-3€ a month, but that's still not free (especially in India) and still not as easy as some social media page / account. Nevertheless, these offerings could be much better and cheaper, especially if there was a reasonably official looking TLD where it's dirt cheap to register a domain name. But is there a business model there? :/
Thinking of IPFS, maybe we shouldn’t refer to content by name and location at once.
Perhaps every business gets a UUID, and that’s the official online ID for that business. Link it to a name only for display (or a list of names, for multiple languages). Now there is the question of how to bind that to a location (IP) online as well as IRL. Maybe a map of business with their UUID maintained by governments based on the post office system to validate it IRL?
It's the administrative part that makes it hard: The registration, the expiration, the distributed responsibility of needing a NIC, registrar, DNS operator, hosting platform, Certificate Authority—we're all used to the bullshit, but getting from "I'd like to present my business under this domain" to presenting your business under this domain requires way too much bureaucracy.
The whole process is still stuck in the 90ies: It shouldn't require more than picking a name and providing payment details to get running. Delegation of anything could happen easily via OAuth grants; TLS should just work, given ACME; all other details can be customised if necessary, but normal users should never have to bother with DNS records at all.
Deleted Comment
You assume that business owners should do this themselves, but why? It's very cheap to get a contractor to make you a good website, so that's what business owners should do: contract somebody to do it. That's what business owners also do for signage, print promotion, accounting, machine maintenance, etc.
Most things except for breathing i too complex for most people, including for business owners. That's why there's business-to-business professional services.
> Perhaps we need to rethink discoverability and identity on the internet in ways that are more intuitive for ordinary users
Isn't this why search engines became popular in the first place? Because they "solved" discoverability? And before Instagram and WhatsApp existed, they worked fine.
Isn't the reason businesses moved to Instagram and WhatsApp is because people moved to those services? and not the other way around.
Are there any good resources/blogs/people/etc I should look at to learn more?
With DNS you are somewhat independent, with social media you’re one executive order away from shutting down the whole economy
This is just one of things that "works" and you can't really get around. Tangentially related but one of my friends started a photo booth rental business and was asking me about how to build his web presence. At first he suggested a website and I told him he should have a website but I also told him that an solid Instagram account (we are in the US) would work just as well.
Is it batshit crazy on a conceptual level to get into bed with a big tech company for your web presence? Yeah it absolutely is. But does it actually work and is the most likely way for you to drive sales? Yeah it absolutely is.
You have to follow the track to their owner who ultimately is nothing more than some Dutch managers saved of their mismanagement by a buddy Dutch Investment fund ....owned by a South African base...that is a front end to Chinese investments via Tencent Holdings...
But hey...they have a Ethics hotline and can think of multiple ethnics violations to report here:
https://app.convercent.com/en-gb/LandingPage/d8e86634-ec59-e...