Death & Domains

A recent piece on “forever domains” sparked bigger questions about permanence online: when domain owners die out, do we need new systems that don't rely on domains at all?Should domains last forever? That’s not a new question for me, but it’s one that I’ve been thinking more about lately, especially since I ended up writing a story recently that posed this exact question.Over at the new publication GraveSite, which covers the concept of death and grief with a reporter’s eye, I posed a question I’ve thought a lot about over the years: How can you keep a person’s digital identity alive even if their physical identity is long gone? For corporate entities this is actually reasonably easy—succession plans and all that, ensuring someone is paying the bills long-term.But people aren‘t corporations, and business structures like domain registrars and web hosts often treat us as consumers. Which means that when we aren’t around to consume, and to pay money in exchange for that consumption,…