> How are you going to pay for the (substantial) cost of running a TLD without registration fee revenue? Is this a loss leader for other services? Are you operating on a 100% donation model?

We plan on operating the domain as a public good and are actively seeking sponsors to help fund us. Think of it as a similar model to ISRG and LetsEncrypt.

> No parking, squatting, or reselling

Our rule of one person per subdomain will hopefully prevent this at scale, though it will admittedly be more difficult to examine any particular domain so closely. We may have to implement some type of heartbeat where the owner of said domain has to respond within a certain amount of time.

> How are you going to pay for the (substantial) cost of running a TLD without registration fee revenue?

Is it actually a substantial expense? The TLD itself only has to publish the nameserver records, which generally have a TTL of about a day. A DNS response is a few hundred bytes. Big DNS providers like Google and Cloudflare would make requests for every actively used domain every day, but then cache them. Smaller providers wouldn't cache as well but also wouldn't each request every domain every day. For e.g. a million personal domains, ballpark estimate is somewhere in the few TB a month of traffic. Maybe a little over personal hobby project money but definitely not outrageous for a small non-profit organization.

> How do you plan to tell the difference between a parked/squatted domain and one in legitimate use but offering no public-facing services?

This is the easy one. Squatters buy domains because they want to sell them. To sell them they have to make it publicly known to prospective buyers that the domain is available for sale. So then if anyone lists the domain for sale anywhere, you make them prove that they own it (which any actual buyer would also have to do in order to not get scammed) and when they do the domain is forfeit.

It's kind of sad that we don't do that for all domains. Domain squatters can go to hell.

It's not clear whether they're actually talking about domains or subdomains there, which is a worrying sign from a potential registrar.

Is it really that expensive to run a TLD? Name servers are notoriously long running on ancient spec servers.

I’m guessing, if designed well, the registration process could run on lightweight infrastructure. Maybe $1-5k total per year, not counting time. So it’s enough for a fun hobby project.

Might be a public service? I guess many countries already had such a thing with running cost several order higher than such a thing as a TLD, operating for centuries now.