The Growth of Domain Names and the Future of AI in Internet Identity

Dave Lockie:
Hello everyone, this is Dave Lockie. We are on the Open Channels podcast. I’m here with my friend Robert Jacoby. I’m Dave Lockie. Let’s get into it, Robert. How have you been since WordCamp Europe? What have you been up to?

Robert Jacobi:
Boy, time flies when you’re never at home. It’s, it’s been a, a hectic, uh, couple of weeks, month. It’s a month already. Wow. Um, still, still recovering from the, the greatness that was WordCamp Europe. That was— I really enjoyed that. That was fantastic all around. Content people. I know we had our podcast there, but it’s just, it’s one of those things that’s just nice to see, like, really come together. Um, And I, you know, everyone there was leaving happy, feeling successful, uh, got to, you know, meet with the community, network, get business done, uh, and then, uh, off to ICANN, our internet, uh, naming people. Uh, they had a policy event. I know that sounds as exciting as it sounds.

Dave Lockie:
That’s right.

Robert Jacobi:
Uh, but, uh, given some of the, uh, travel madness, this ICANN policy event, which was in, uh, Sevilla, Spain. Uh, a gorgeous city, had never been there before. But there are a lot more folks there than probably would have normally been for a typical ICANN Policy Summit, just because the annual general meeting, uh, that got moved around due to geopolitical events, and then it got moved to Bali, which, uh, has kind of nixed a lot of people’s travel expectations because it’s just far to go to when it was originally, uh, in Oman. And then just travel prices and all that. A lot of people were just not going to do it anyway. So the Policy Summit was probably 2 to 3x larger than it normally would have been. So again, great connections, policy work. If you like policy work, then it was great and great area, great, great week. And ICANNs are usually fantastic events, but you really need to be in that space to get the most out of it. And I sit on one of the committees, so that makes it a lot easier or meaningful, I should say, not easier, but meaningful.

Dave Lockie:
So how about ICANN?

Robert Jacobi:
So ICANN is such a different event. Having to explain what ICANN is and what these meetings are like is very— it’s like a United Nations meeting.

Dave Lockie:
Is your own little NATO summit?

Robert Jacobi:
Really? I mean, you have live translators. I mean, if you look at footage of a United Nations or NATO summit or something like that, that’s kind of what ICANN looks like. It lives in a rarefied space given its responsibility for the internet.

Dave Lockie:
Yeah, seems quite important.

Robert Jacobi:
Well, it kind of runs it, so, uh, but it also, you know, the last 12 to 18 months have been very interesting because 12 years ago we had all of the new top-level domain names, so you could get like .cat, you know, .dave, .whatever. And this kind of like process occurs very rarely. This is now, we’re in the second new top-level domain name phase, and the last one was 12 years ago. So it doesn’t happen very often. There’s a lot of process around that. There’s the politics around that, the money behind that to see how many domain TLDs is GoDaddy going to apply for, crazy things like that. You wonder and you don’t know, and a lot of it is done by form submissions. Policymakers don’t know until sort of the opening the envelope day of who’s submitting for what, because you can have multiple parties interested in .cat. So it gets— it’s—

Dave Lockie:
I’m sure there are many.

Robert Jacobi:
Well, I prefer .dog, but, but yeah, there’s a— it’s, it’s fascinating to watch because the last time around I wasn’t really involved in ICANN. And now that I’m just on an at-large committee, so Honestly, this is actually part of the job, is trying to get North Americans interested in ICANN and part of the process.

Dave Lockie:
Okay, well, look, I’ve got 2 questions for you. Would that help?

Robert Jacobi:
Now that’s being knee-deep in the process, it’s just so critical and relevant to running the internet, and there’s money and time and people and resources being put into this.

Dave Lockie:
Okay, so with your ICANN hat on, Robert, 2 questions. One, we often hear about how the open web is suffering at the hands of the centralized platforms. And the way I think about how that shows up for domain names is you need a domain name for some things like Shopify, you need a domain name, but you don’t need a domain name for Instagram or TikTok or Facebook. In fact, it’s this sort of one domain name with a user or a handle at that domain name. So does that give us any insights at all? The number of domain names being registered is presumably going up because otherwise, why would we have more TLDs if people aren’t buying domain names anymore? Then why would we be doing more? Is that a correct supposition? So even though we’ve got this perception that the open web is struggling in the face of these SaaS companies, we’re still seeing a growth in domain name registrations. Is that true?

Robert Jacobi:
That is absolutely true. And it’s fascinating. I mean, year over year, it’s still growing.

Dave Lockie:
And that includes like active domains as well, because like I’d like to buy a few domain names just to make me feel guilty about not doing anything with them every year.

Robert Jacobi:
Well, and you probably do that as well, like a lot of people, to speculate. And it’s real estate. Its TLDs, top-level domains, are the acres and hectares of land that you can get on the internet. It’s just that what’s interesting is you can grow that piece of land or not. You can have that little bit that’s assigned, or you can actually have a full farm, which something like a Facebook does.

Dave Lockie:
Mm-hmm.

Robert Jacobi:
especially with AI coming into the mix.

Dave Lockie:
Facebook’s more than a farm, dude. Facebook’s like the USA of the internet. It’s more like a country.

Robert Jacobi:
Well, yeah, okay, yeah, maybe a planet. Um, but with AI and people spinning up a lot of, uh, micro apps, yep, they’re throwing domains on them, even if it’s just for a year to test it out, or if it’s really some kind of MVP that’s going to be a project. So, uh, what’s, what’s interesting, there’s there’s been spikes literally due to— because of AI, with people just spinning up, you know, apps on Lovable or, uh, Vercel or whatever you want and thinking, oh yeah, I should throw a domain name on there. So it’s, it’s, it’s this fascinating space. And, you know, 10 years ago I would have never thought I’d be paying attention as much as I am, but folks should because it, it can be a leading indicator of things.

Dave Lockie:
So you’ve kind of touched on my second question, which was, um, what was the chat about AI at ICANN? Like what new interesting things did you hear about or think about when thinking about domain names and AI? And obviously you’ve covered the fact that people are now vibe coding up a bunch of stuff and buying more domain names to like have nobody visit their vibe coded app. But like, what, what other things were talked about?

Robert Jacobi:
The biggest concern at ICANN is always abuse. So folks buying a bunch of domain names, starting to spam out of them, CSAM, all those kinds of things. So there are a lot of abuse processes, criteria. People go back and forth because different regions have different legal ideas of what some of these terms mean, so on and so forth. But AI is coming into play as a way to track and evaluate the kinds of content that may be on certain domain names. So there’s a lot of monitoring and reporting, abuse reporting, all that kind of stuff that AI is accelerating in the process. And in fact, I was at Nordic Domain Days, and Porkbun gave a presentation on a tool they’re using to actually help facilitate potential competitive word choices for the TLDs. And they’re using some AI and community services around that, keeping it anonymized, all this kind of— AI is sneaking into places in the domain name space because there’s so much data. If you look at any domain name or any registrar that is maintaining 10,000 domain names, not like a GoDaddy, which has obviously millions, but even smaller ones, they have to keep an eye on what’s going on with all of that all the time because a domain name may be marked for abuse at a totally different registrar somewhere else and whatnot. That data has got to come in. It’s got to be acted upon. has to be acted upon correctly, uh, because it’s not just turn it on, turn it off, which I think we just saw— what country was it? Um, Montenegro. Montenegro. And, uh, so, uh, Montenegro accidentally turned off all of, like, Telegram.

Dave Lockie:
Okay.

Robert Jacobi:
Because they got an abuse report for one of the T.me redirects, right? Instead of killing the redirect, they killed T.me, period.

Sponsor Announcer:
Oopsies.

Robert Jacobi:
Yeah, oopsies. So, I mean, AI can help solve some of these problems by making sure that the right questions are asked before you hit the kill button.

Dave Lockie:
Or by just like nuking a whole bunch of domain names because it got it wrong.

Robert Jacobi:
Correct. Correct.

Dave Lockie:
Also highly likely. All right. So, was there any conversation around If and how agents will want their own domains. Like, let’s have an agent out and about. Like, at the moment, I don’t really have a public-facing identity or handle. I’m just like an actor in the space.

Robert Jacobi:
ICANN is pretty hands-off on that.

Dave Lockie:
Okay.

Robert Jacobi:
They’re worried about just making sure you get from point A to point B.

Dave Lockie:
Right.

Robert Jacobi:
The implications of point A to point B, unless they violate some high-level policy, are irrelevant.

Dave Lockie:
Just feels like a big opportunity for domains. If we believe Cloudflare’s stats, there are now more agents than people. And so if you’re going to have agents using the web and they choose not to use domains for stuff and not to use those as kind of identifiers and routers, then That’s a pretty big implication for the domain name system, right?

Robert Jacobi:
They still have to get from A to B unless they’re going to be just crawling numbers.

Dave Lockie:
Right, right, right, right. But like, you don’t have to buy a domain name to get from A to B, but you have to buy a domain name to signpost where B is.

Robert Jacobi:
Correct. Oh, I see what you’re saying. Yes. I do expect, and right now .agent is not a TLD, but I expect there to be some kind of crazy bidding war for .agent. And things like that. So you can actually— I think it would be good for the internet in general just to be able to say, definitely not a human, I’m an agent.

Dave Lockie:
I’m sure everyone will follow that.

Robert Jacobi:
Well, for those that don’t know Dave, his British sarcasm is quite, quite dry.

Dave Lockie:
Okay, all right, well, my turn. I went to an event called Identity Week in Amsterdam. And I went because Automattic has WordPress.com, which powers Sign In with WordPress.com. It’s an OAuth 2 and 2.1 OAuth provider, so you can add it to your site if you want people to be able to sign in with their WordPress.com accounts. We have Gravatar. We have a bunch of related things as well, like Mesh. Which is a social network, very relevant for identity, and Beeper, which is messaging, which is also very relevant for identity. So I went with the expectation of trying to understand where, you know, what’s happening with identity and how all these things might fit together better for us and for our customers. And it was kind of fun event, actually. There were 2, I guess, 2 main groups. There was the physical security identity people, so passport makers, chip breeders, all that kind of stuff. So everything from UV glowing threads that you’d weave into currency to detecting liveness. Liveness was quite a conversation. So now, I don’t know if you use one of the neobanks like Revolut or whatever, but they want you to, as part of their auth, you need to put your face in the oval and move it around or whatever. They’re trying to figure out, are you an actual human? And there was a good presentation where they were talking about how initially people could get around facial recognition stuff just by printing off a Oh yeah, just have this photograph and— Precise. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Then we got to a point where there were really quite sophisticated masks. So you can 3D print a mask and put it over, but now you’re getting to synthetics. So this is entirely AI-generated on a screen. But then the step beyond that is where you, maybe it’s like hijacking was the next one where you are actually just like taking over the signal to and from the camera, uh, directly.

Robert Jacobi:
Oh, oh, good. An old-fashioned man-in-the-middle attack. And, but it’s a man-in-the-middle attack. You, you would do that with DNS or anything else just to hijack that feed and send it false positives.

Dave Lockie:
Yeah. So that, that side of things was pretty fun and interesting. Not particularly relevant to what we do, but interesting to think about how AI is starting to show up in like real world and, you know, as ever in cybersecurity. But then the other kind of big group was the online, the digital identity. And that was where a lot of AI stuff started showing up, and particularly around identity and access management. So your Oktas and OpenBOW, and there’s another one as well who I talked to. And a lot of them are thinking about, I saw an interesting presentation from Huawei, and they were talking about, okay, so you’ve got an agent, and it’s technical support into an agentic process. So you get an error report or a warning, like your disk is full on this server, then how do you provide the identity and access management for agents to go and do that work?

Robert Jacobi:
So yeah, how does my website, when the disk drive gets full, How does my agent get notified to either delete temp files or, you know, purchase a higher plan?

Dave Lockie:
So the notification part is easy. The agent being able to actually do the work is increasingly like possible and easy, but doing like being able to permission the agent so that it can do it with auditability and guardrails and policy compliance is actually really difficult because what you’re going to need to do is like Spin up an agent, give it access to specific systems with very specific fine-grained permissions, but also within a tight timeframe as well. And you’re going to have to have a supervisory agent that now has permission to oversee and potentially roll back what that agent does. So you might have, you can imagine, spool this out a couple of years, you might have 5,000 more identities to worry about in your enterprise one minute than you did the minute before, because there’s been some kind of like, uh, issue and you need to spin up a whole bunch of identities, make sure they can go and fix the thing, but not do more than fix the thing. And they can’t like accidentally just like fix the disk overage by removing all the data from the disk. So like, because they’re, they’re probabilistic and you need to like, in enterprise, I think you’re going to increasingly want to put guardrails around it to reduce the possibility of non-good outcomes. So thinking about that was really interesting. I was thinking about how does that apply for WordPress? We have roles and capabilities. Most people don’t really get into the guts of that for WordPress at the moment. We’re kind of at a level where if you want your Claude to drive your WordPress site, you go and create an application password for it, and it YOLOs in via WP-CLI with full access. But There is actually a pretty good and extensive and fine-grained set of capabilities that you can extend and do stuff with in WordPress. So it’d be interesting to see how that can get leveraged or needs to be extended for agents. But even that’s not quite enough because you’re going to need a whole bunch of things that go around that, that core doesn’t currently provide, like auditability and recoverability and—

Robert Jacobi:
Mm-hmm.

Dave Lockie:
Yeah. All of this kind of stuff. So I’ve been thinking a lot about that and I found that kind of a particularly interesting vein of things to think about as we enter this kind of, I guess, the world where the tasks that people used to do are increasingly being done by AIs. Then at the moment we’re in a kind of FAFO version of that. There’s going to be There’s going to be an increasing need for tooling around that to optimize outcomes and deal with that at scale. When you’ve suddenly got, maybe you’ve got 100 agents working on your Woo store on any given day, what does that look like? How do you manage it? How do you make sure that everything’s still working? So yeah, that was pretty interesting. What other events have you been to, Robert?

Robert Jacobi:
Before we get to that one, I wanna follow up because it’s actually a windmill I’ve been tilting at for decades now. We need a real database, real database management, and all that, because you need ongoing transaction logging so you can roll back. You need tables that have atomic data, all this kind of stuff. Because, again, yeah, you could easily have a very simple site, but all of a sudden, 200 agents hit it, and they’re all making requests. The database is being updated and managed in a million different ways all of a sudden. You may actually have a hard time figuring out what is the one thing that made it all go wrong as well. Fine, I can roll back to a backup from yesterday. Well, that’s great, but that still means I have a huge issue somewhere in the agent pipeline. And being able to debug, understand, have that information, roll back, you know, database transactions and requests step by step, like real database geeks do, which I wish I was. I just pretend to be one.

Dave Lockie:
Like, maybe.

Robert Jacobi:
I’d love it. I’d love it so much. I mean, really.

Dave Lockie:
I think Microsoft still offers, like, database— I think you could become a, like, Microsoft SQL Certified Engineer if you wanted to. I think you’ve got it, Robert.

Robert Jacobi:
Yeah, I don’t know if I have time for that right now, but thank you. I’ll keep that in mind.

Dave Lockie:
It’s your dream, buddy. I’m just trying to enable you.

Robert Jacobi:
I just love it. It’s the geekiest, most foundational aspect of so much of what we do, and it needs a lot of care and feeding in it. I would love to see things happen to the way WordPress and databases, if we’re going to talk about WordPress specifically, how they work together and make them more scalable and AI-ready, space alien-ready, whatever it is. Because I think there are just core issues in a lot of what a default WordPress database looks like. I know I’m definitely not the only person in the universe who thinks that.

Dave Lockie:
Well, no, but the good news is once you’ve done your Microsoft exam and are like fully database geeked up, then WordPress is an open source project and you can propose a track change to implement transaction rollbacks at the database level. You can change your destiny, Robert.

Robert Jacobi:
Of all the people that I do these calls with, you’re the one who’s the only one who’s going to get me to actually swear at you online.

Dave Lockie:
That can be my goal. You know what? I think I actually did start doing the MSCE, whatever they’re like.

Robert Jacobi:
MSCE, Microsoft Certified Engineer of XYZ.

Dave Lockie:
Yeah, I think I started doing the MS SQL, MSCE exam at some point. In fact, I think I got to the exam level, failed it, and I was like, I’m giving up on this. It was too hard.

Robert Jacobi:
It’s just code. I mean, you just have to understand why the code is there. It’s just another language. It really is. But it’s—

Dave Lockie:
It was just a language I decided I was no longer motivated to learn.

Robert Jacobi:
You can’t speak it at home, so it’s not going to happen. Exactly.

Dave Lockie:
It’s a bit like Latin. I wish I could understand it and speak it fluently, but ultimately, there are other priorities. So anyway—

Robert Jacobi:
Absolutely fair.

Dave Lockie:
Yeah. Interesting. to start thinking about WordPress agentic readiness. And definitely lots of conversations happening at Automattic, as you might expect about that. And a bunch of cool projects came out of RSM.

Robert Jacobi:
RSM, for the audience, means?

Dave Lockie:
Radical Speed Month, which was a month-long experiment where teams of 2 could decide to drop whatever they were doing, within reason, and go and build a thing that they wanted to build, which was an amazing opportunity and experiment. People built some wild and very cool stuff.

Robert Jacobi:
So it’s like the pair programming meets hackathon meets Claude.

Dave Lockie:
Yeah, exactly. Yeah. So that was an interesting event in the end. And actually, got out of it something that I wasn’t expecting to when I went into it, which is often like the best thing for an event like that. Um, but I think you’ve been doing some more traveling as well. Like, what else have you been up to?

Robert Jacobi:
Uh, I guess the most exciting thing in the last couple of weeks was I was able to attend the, uh, uh, Code for the People premiere in New York. Um, unfortunately there were not 1,000 photographers there and a giant red carpet, but, uh, I think there was about 200 people there. We got into a little theater, and it was really cool. It was a great experience. I wish the movie was longer. I mean, it’s actually— I don’t know if people have been streaming it yet, because I know it’s available. It was a wonderful experience. And we had a reporter from Variety there who was doing the post-movie panel discussion, folks from Automattic there to answer questions that were in the movie. It was cool. It was really cool. Yeah.

Dave Lockie:
I enjoyed it.

Robert Jacobi:
I, you know, I’m gonna tell everyone it’s not that long. It’s what, 20, 25 minutes? Uh, much shorter than I, I anticipated something feature-length, much longer. Yeah, I mean, like, well, an hour plus-ish, just because, yeah, why not? Um, so yeah, it’s an easy watch. And, um, uh, you know, my only real comment is I, I want more, uh, stronger pieces like this to actually let folks who aren’t in the industry know how important open source is and that it touches literally everything you do every day of the week. I was looking last week at some open source statistics. I mean, Linux in and of itself runs 90— is on 96% plus of all devices. So in some way, shape, or form, that’s an open source project. You know, people did this for free, for all intents and purposes, until it got more monetized. But, you know, these are things that really come from the heart and desire for folks to get in and change the world. And it’s exciting, and I’m glad we have things like Code for the People to kind of get that conversation moving for folks who aren’t in the space.

Dave Lockie:
I have it on my calendar to watch tomorrow afternoon, so thank you for bringing that up.

Robert Jacobi:
I love code, I love open source, and it doesn’t mean I don’t wanna make some money off of this at the end of the day, but The value— code right now is inhaled like air by everyone on this planet. Everyone. It touches everyone. There is a responsibility and a power for those of us who work with code and projects, not necessarily as engineers, because God knows those engineering days of mine are long gone. But these are critical, important things that not only, you know, help us out today, but really drive future innovation and, you know, what our children, our grandchildren, will experience as part of a digital world. It’s magical. It’s only something that’s come to fruition in the last, what, less than 50 years? I mean, we’re literally at the beginning of a new element, sort of a Grecian element, fire, earth, water, air, and now code.

Dave Lockie:
And now intelligence.

Robert Jacobi:
I get quite passionate about open source because it’s an enabler and powerful and lets individuals create and be whatever they can be. Yeah.

Dave Lockie:
But I’m always going to be supportive of somebody being into open source. Always.

Robert Jacobi:
That was a very remarkable emotional statement from Dave Lockie.

Dave Lockie:
What do I think about it? I mean, yeah, of course I’m passionate about it. It’s why I do what I do every day. I felt like my CV was enough of a statement. The 20 years I’ve spent working in WordPress and open source. Space seems, uh, seems to punctuate your, your, your view on it.

Robert Jacobi:
Exactly, exactly.

Dave Lockie:
Uh, okay, so, okay, for the people, that was in New York, I think you said? Yeah?

Robert Jacobi:
Correct. And then a week later, they, uh, so I guess last week, I’m losing track of time. Yeah, so this was 2 weeks ago in New York, and then last week, uh, there was a sort of West Coast opening, uh, that was in San Francisco. I was not there for that one.

Dave Lockie:
Very cool. And, um, was that it? Was that the end of your post, uh, WC travels?

Robert Jacobi:
Yeah, I think that’s fair. So I get to spend a couple of weeks at home and then, uh, and then August kicks off, uh, most likely with, uh, CMS Connect up in Montreal. It’s a small conference. And then obviously WordCamp US is the next big one on my list. And then there’s a full fall, everything from, you know, CloudFest Americas, MSP Global. There’s a bunch of big ones. There are probably like 12 or 15 events going on in the fall that—

Dave Lockie:
You do a lot of miles.

Robert Jacobi:
Yeah, it’s March through June, and then now it’s August through November.

Dave Lockie:
Yeah, that’s a lot. Cool, man. Well, I wish you safe onwards travels, and I guess we’ll speak again in a month or so and see what we’ve been up to since then. Pleasure as always, Robert. And yes, enjoy your time at home and speak soon.

Robert Jacobi:
Thank you, Dave.