Sarah Gooding, writing at WP Tavern about Automattic’s 100-year plan:
What resources will a URL (Uniform Resource Locator) point to 50 years from now? Or will URLs be discarded into the scrap pile of obsolete building blocks as soon as there’s a better, more efficient way to identify web addresses?
I think URLs and HTTP are here to stay. The web is over 30 years old and the basic foundation is strong.
John Payne :procella: @manton yeah, but you can only renew a domain for 10 years at a time...
Manton Reece @john Right, the idea is Automattic will keep renewing the domain for you every 10 years. Maybe more important than the actual hosting.
Sven Dahlstrand Yeah, the domain thing is probably going to be a much bigger challenge than keeping data and servers alive. What happens if your TLD ceases to exist? .oz and .su are no longer with us, for example. And your blog’s content might not break your registrar’s terms of service today, but what about tomorrow? Or fifty years from now? And what about future laws? Your blog might be legal today, but not in a decade.
Will Automattic register a new domain for you if the old one is lost? Will they rewrite your blog’s content to comply with future laws? It’s an interesting challenge!
Manton Reece @sod Good questions. On the legality of content, I think that would be very rare, and it would be appropriate to remove posts if needed. You would need to trust Automattic to do the best they can to maintain it. For domain names, they could restrict the TLDs to common ones (or require .blog which they own).