When we started thinking seriously about geographic namespaces — about what it means for a place to have a name on the internet, who controls that name, and who profits from it — we kept arriving at the same uncomfortable realisation. The names of real places, real communities, real cultures, are being treated as inventory. They are listed in catalogues. They are priced. They are renewed annually, like magazine subscriptions. They are bought by investors who have never set foot in the places they now nominally represent online. And almost nobody talks about how strange that is.

We are not the first people to notice this. But we think the conversation has stayed too narrow for too long — confined mostly to the technical world, to domain registrars, to ICANN policy documents, to debates about governance structures that most people will never read. The philosophical question underneath all of it — the question of whether a place’s digital name is a public resource or a private product — has largely gone unanswered, or been answered by default, by the market, without anyone formally deciding that the market was the right mechanism to use.

We think it is time to have that conversation properly.

What is a namespace, really?

A namespace is a system for assigning unique identifiers. In the physical world, we have them everywhere. Street addresses are a namespace. Postcodes are a namespace. Phone numbers are a namespace. Each of these systems allows things — people, places, buildings, services — to be found, distinguished from one another, and referred to consistently over time.

The internet has its own namespace: the Domain Name System, which translates human-readable addresses into the numerical addresses that computers use to route traffic. At the top of that system sit the top-level domains — the suffixes that appear after the final dot in any web address. Some of these are generic (.com, .org, .net). Some are tied to countries (.au, .uk, .de). And some are tied to places — cities, regions, cultural identities — in ways that go beyond the purely administrative.

What makes geographic namespaces different from all the others is that they carry meaning that belongs to communities, not to any single organisation or company. When someone registers a name under .brisbane, or .queensland, or .gold-coast, they are not just choosing a technical identifier. They are claiming a piece of a place’s digital presence. They are associating themselves — their business, their identity, their project — with a community that exists in the physical world, with a history, a culture, a geography, and people who live and work there.

That meaning is not created by the registry operator. It is not created by ICANN, or by any domain registrar. It is created by the community itself, over generations, through the accumulated life of a place. The namespace borrows that meaning. It trades on it. And the question of who controls it, and on what terms, is therefore not merely a technical or commercial question. It is a civic one.

The commons problem that nobody named

Economists talk about the commons — resources that are shared by a community and that no single person created, owns, or can legitimately claim exclusive control over. The classic examples are physical: a pasture that all the village farmers graze their animals on, a fishery that all the boats in a harbour draw from, a water table that all the wells in a region depend on.

The commons can be managed well or badly. When they are managed well, they tend to be governed by rules that the community itself develops, that reflect the community’s actual needs, and that prevent any one actor from extracting so much value that the resource is degraded for everyone else. When they are managed badly — when they are treated as an open-access free-for-all, or when they are enclosed and privatised — they tend to be exploited in ways that harm the broader community.

Geographic namespaces are a kind of commons. The value of a .brisbane address, for example, does not come from the registry infrastructure that powers it, or from the act of registration, or from any private investment. It comes from Brisbane — from the fact that Brisbane is a real, living, growing, internationally recognised city with a distinctive character and a community of people who identify with it. The name has meaning because the place has meaning. The namespace inherits that meaning as a matter of course.

And yet, the governance structures that have grown up around domain names treat geographic namespaces almost entirely as commercial products. Registry operators pay to control them. Registrants pay to rent names within them. The registry charges annual fees. The registrar takes a margin. The underlying meaning — the civic value, the community identity, the cultural weight of the place name — is essentially a free input that the commercial infrastructure extracts value from, without any corresponding obligation to the community whose identity is being monetised.

This is not a conspiracy. Nobody designed it this way deliberately. It emerged from the early architecture of the internet, which was built by engineers and computer scientists thinking about technical routing problems, not by city planners or civic theorists thinking about public interest obligations. The infrastructure worked, and it scaled, and by the time anyone thought to ask whether the governance model was fair to communities, it was already deeply entrenched.

But entrenchment is not justification. The fact that something has always been done a certain way is not an argument that it should continue to be done that way, especially when the stakes have risen so dramatically. In the early days of the internet, a geographic domain name was a technical curiosity. Today, it is part of the core infrastructure of how a community presents itself to the world, how its businesses are found, how its cultural institutions are identified, how its members signal belonging and pride and identity.

What we mean when we say “public interest”

Public interest is a phrase that gets used loosely, but it has a reasonably precise meaning in civic philosophy. Something is in the public interest when it affects the wellbeing of the broader community in ways that go beyond the interests of any particular individual or organisation — when it touches on things that communities need in order to function, to thrive, to maintain their character and their collective life.

Roads are in the public interest. Not because every individual uses every road, but because the existence of a functioning road network enables the economic and social life of the community as a whole. The same is true of utilities — water, electricity, telecommunications. These are things that, left entirely to market logic, would not be provided equitably, would not be maintained reliably, and would not be governed in ways that reflect the full range of community needs. That is why, across nearly every democratic society, they are subject to some form of public interest obligation, whether through public ownership, regulated private provision, or some hybrid model.

We think geographic namespaces deserve the same frame. Not because they are identical to roads or water mains, but because they serve analogous functions in the digital fabric of community life. A community’s digital namespace is part of its infrastructure for presenting itself to the world, for organising its economic activity, for maintaining its cultural presence on the internet. As more and more of civic and commercial life migrates online, that infrastructure becomes more important, not less.

And infrastructure that is important to the whole community should be governed in ways that serve the whole community — not in ways that maximise extraction by whoever happens to control the pipes.

The enclosure of digital place

There is a historical parallel worth dwelling on. In medieval and early modern England, the enclosure movement privatised the common lands that village communities had farmed collectively for centuries. The arguments made for enclosure were mostly economic: private owners would invest in the land, improve it, make it more productive. And in some narrow sense, that was true. But what was lost in the process was something that no market calculation fully captured — the right of ordinary people to a relationship with the land that was not mediated by payment to a private landlord.

Something analogous has happened with the digital names of places. Communities that have built up rich, meaningful, internationally recognised identities over decades — sometimes centuries — find that the digital expression of those identities is controlled by private entities, subject to annual fees, and ultimately available to whoever is willing to pay the renewal cost, regardless of whether they have any actual connection to the place.

The registry operator for a geographic TLD did not build Brisbane. They did not build Queensland. They did not plant the roots from which the cultural meaning of those names grew. They built some infrastructure — admittedly valuable, admittedly technically sophisticated — and that infrastructure entitles them to charge for their services. But it does not entitle them to treat the underlying meaning of those place names as their private asset, to be monetised indefinitely without obligation to the communities whose identity gives the namespace its value.

This is the enclosure problem of digital place. The common meaning of a geographic name — the accumulated cultural and social capital that makes .brisbane a meaningful address rather than a random string of letters — has been quietly enclosed by commercial registry infrastructure, with no formal acknowledgement that anything of civic value was being taken.

The annual renewal model and what it actually means

Let us say something plainly about the traditional domain name renewal model, because we think its implications for communities are rarely stated directly.

When a domain name requires annual renewal, what that means in practice is that no community institution, no small business, no individual resident, can ever truly own their place within the namespace. They can only rent it. And rental, as every renter knows, is a form of conditional occupancy. The landlord sets the terms. The landlord can raise the price. The landlord can decline to renew. And when the relationship ends, the tenant loses not just the space but everything they built within it — the links that point to it, the identity that has accumulated around it, the trust that their audience has placed in that address.

For a business, this is a commercial risk. For a cultural institution — a community organisation, a local news outlet, a neighbourhood association — it is potentially an existential one. And for a community as a whole, the cumulative effect of a namespace governed by rental logic is a kind of digital precarity: a perpetual state of conditional belonging, where the right to be present and findable in your own community’s digital space is subject to ongoing payment to a private intermediary.

This is not how we govern other kinds of civic infrastructure. We do not require residents to pay annual fees to keep their street addresses. We do not require libraries to renew their postcodes. Physical place names are treated as stable public infrastructure, maintained at collective cost, available to everyone who lives and works in a place. Digital place names have never been granted that status. We think they should be.

Why permanence matters for communities

There is something deeper at stake in the question of permanence than just the inconvenience of renewal fees. When a name is permanent — when it is genuinely, unconditionally yours, not subject to any ongoing obligation to a third party — it becomes a foundation that you can build on with confidence. You can invest in it. You can create around it. You can make long-term commitments that depend on its continued existence.

When a name is rented, your relationship with it is always provisional. You build, but you build on borrowed ground. The foundations can always be pulled out from under you — not by any dramatic act of expropriation, but simply by the quiet logic of the market: prices rise, registrars consolidate, companies are acquired, priorities change, and one day you find that the address you built your community presence around is no longer accessible, or no longer affordable, or controlled by an entity that has no interest in the community the address represents.

Permanence is not just a convenience. It is a precondition for genuine civic investment in digital infrastructure. A community that can own its digital addresses — truly own them, not just rent them — can build digital institutions that are as durable and as rooted as physical ones. A community that can only rent is always, at some level, a tenant in its own digital space.

The question of who gets to represent a place

There is another dimension to the public interest argument for geographic namespaces that we think is worth exploring carefully: the question of representation.

When someone holds a name within a geographic namespace — when they own, say, business.brisbane or culture.queensland — they are not just claiming a technical address. They are, in a meaningful sense, representing themselves as part of that place. The address signals a relationship. It says: we are of this community. We are here. We belong.

That signal has real value, and it draws on the real meaning of the place name. But in the traditional domain name model, the right to make that signal is entirely determined by who is willing to pay the registry fees. There is no community endorsement, no civic legitimacy check, no mechanism by which the community itself has any say in who gets to present themselves under its name.

This creates a genuine tension. The meaning of a geographic namespace is a community resource — it belongs, in some real sense, to the community whose name it bears — but the control of that namespace is entirely in private hands. Anyone anywhere in the world can register a name under .brisbane, as long as they pay the fee, regardless of whether they have ever visited Brisbane, have any connection to the city, or have any intention of serving its community.

We are not arguing that geographic namespaces should be restricted to residents — that would create its own problems, and would likely exclude exactly the kinds of diaspora communities and external organisations that have genuine, valuable relationships with places. But we are arguing that the community’s interest in how its name is used deserves some form of formal recognition. It deserves to be a consideration in governance, not just an externality that the registry extracts value from.

Digital sovereignty and the question of who decides

The concept of digital sovereignty has gained considerable traction in recent years. Countries, regions, and communities have begun to assert that they have legitimate interests in the digital infrastructure that serves them — that decisions about how data is stored, how networks are governed, and how digital identities are assigned should not be made purely by global corporations operating under the logic of a single, undifferentiated market.

Geographic namespaces are one of the most concrete and tangible expressions of digital place identity. They are the addresses under which a community presents itself online. They are the identifiers through which its members signal their belonging. They are the infrastructure through which its institutions, businesses, and organisations are found by the rest of the world.

A community that has no meaningful stake in the governance of its own geographic namespace is a community that has, in a significant sense, ceded a part of its digital sovereignty. It has accepted that decisions about who gets to use its name, on what terms, and at what cost, will be made by others — by registry operators, by ICANN policy committees, by the logic of commercial markets — rather than by the community itself.

We think this is a form of digital dispossession that deserves to be named and resisted. Not through hostility to the technical infrastructure that makes geographic namespaces possible, but through a clear-eyed insistence that the governance of those namespaces should reflect the interests of the communities they represent, not just the interests of the commercial entities that administer them.

What the blockchain changes — and what it does not

We have built our geographic namespaces for Queensland on blockchain infrastructure. We think it is worth being honest about what that changes and what it does not.

What the blockchain changes is the architecture of ownership. In a traditional domain name system, your name is held in a centralised registry database. You do not actually own the record — you hold a licence from the registry, subject to their terms, their pricing, and their continued operation. The blockchain changes this by making the ownership record permanent, immutable, and decentralised. A name registered on the blockchain truly belongs to the person who holds it. It cannot be taken back by a registry operator. It cannot expire due to a lapsed payment. It is transferable and tradeable because it is a genuine asset, not a licence.

This is a significant improvement in terms of the relationship between individuals and their digital addresses. It removes the landlord from the equation. It converts renters into owners.

What the blockchain does not change, on its own, is the civic question. The question of whether geographic namespaces should be governed as public resources is a question about governance philosophy and community values, not a question that any technology can answer by itself. Technology can create the conditions for better outcomes — it can make permanent ownership possible, it can remove artificial renewal obligations, it can lower the barriers to access — but it cannot decide, on its own, what the relationship between a namespace and the community it represents should look like.

That is a human question. It is a civic question. And we think it deserves much more serious attention than it has received so far.

The price question is not just about money

We set the price for a permanent address in our Queensland namespaces at five dollars. We want to say something about that decision, because we think it is easy to read it as a commercial tactic — a low entry price to drive adoption — and miss what it actually means.

The price is five dollars because we believe that the barriers to civic participation in a geographic namespace should be as low as possible. In the traditional domain name model, the annual renewal fee functions as a continuous means test. You can participate in the namespace for as long as you can afford to pay. If your circumstances change, if your organisation’s funding dries up, if you are an individual without a stable income — you can lose your address. The fee is not large in absolute terms, but it is a recurring obligation, and recurring obligations accumulate, and they fall disproportionately on the people and organisations that have the least capacity to absorb them.

A one-time, low entry price is a statement about who the namespace is for. It is a statement that it should be accessible to a schoolkid in Townsville and a pensioner in the Gold Coast suburbs, not just to funded businesses and technology-literate professionals. It is a statement that the civic value of a geographic namespace — its role as a community’s digital address space — should be broadly distributed, not concentrated in the hands of those with the most capacity to pay ongoing fees.

This is not charity. It is not a loss leader. It is a design decision that reflects a belief about what geographic namespaces are for. They are not commercial products. They are civic infrastructure. And civic infrastructure should be priced in a way that enables universal participation, not in a way that maximises revenue extraction from a captive community.

What the cities of the future need from their digital infrastructure

We spend a lot of time thinking about what cities will look like over the coming decades — not the physical cities, but the digital layer that increasingly overlays and shapes the physical. The ways in which residents find services, the ways in which businesses identify themselves, the ways in which cultural life is documented and shared, the ways in which civic institutions present themselves to their communities and to the world — all of these are increasingly mediated by digital infrastructure. And the names within that infrastructure — the addresses, the identifiers, the namespaces — are not neutral technical plumbing. They are part of the connective tissue of community life.

Cities that get this right — cities that ensure their digital namespaces are governed as public resources, that they are accessible to everyone, that they are stable and permanent, that they reflect the community’s values and priorities rather than the market’s — will have a genuine advantage in the decades ahead. Their residents and businesses will be able to build digital presences with confidence. Their cultural institutions will have stable, permanent digital addresses. Their community organisations will not face the constant anxiety of annual renewal fees. Their civic digital infrastructure will be as solid and as trustworthy as their physical infrastructure.

Cities that get this wrong — that allow their digital namespaces to be governed entirely by commercial logic, controlled by remote registry operators with no stake in the community’s wellbeing — will find themselves in a position of permanent digital tenancy, paying rent indefinitely for a presence in their own name.

The stakes are not abstract. They are practical. They are civic. And they are becoming more urgent as digital infrastructure becomes more central to every dimension of community life.

The stewardship model

We want to propose a frame that we think is more useful than either the commercial product frame or the purely idealistic civic frame: stewardship.

A steward is someone who holds and manages a resource on behalf of others. The steward has real responsibilities — to maintain the resource, to make it accessible, to ensure it serves its intended purpose — but the steward does not own the resource in the sense of being able to do with it whatever they please. The steward’s authority is conditional on their service to the community the resource belongs to.

We think this is the right model for geographic namespace operators. We are not the owners of Queensland’s digital identity. Queensland owns its digital identity — the people who live there, the businesses that operate there, the institutions that serve it, the culture that has grown up there over generations. We are stewards. We built infrastructure. We have obligations. We have the responsibility to maintain what we have built, to govern it in ways that reflect the community’s interest, to ensure it remains accessible, permanent, and genuinely useful.

The stewardship model changes the ethical calculus in important ways. Under the commercial product model, the registry operator’s primary obligation is to shareholders or investors — to maximise the financial return from controlling the namespace. Under the stewardship model, the primary obligation is to the community — to ensure that the namespace serves the people whose identity it draws on and whose lives it affects.

We chose the stewardship model. Not because it is easier — it is not — but because we believe it is the only model that is actually honest about what geographic namespaces are.

The argument for civic seriousness

We have been building this project for a while now, and one of the things we have found is that the people who engage most deeply with it are not, primarily, technology enthusiasts or cryptocurrency advocates. They are people who have a genuine stake in place — people who care about Brisbane, about Queensland, about the Gold Coast and Surfers Paradise as communities, not just as markets. Business owners who have built their lives in these places. Community organisations that represent their members’ collective interests. Individuals who feel a genuine connection to where they live and want to express that connection in their digital life.

These people are not asking for a product. They are asking for something more like a civic amenity — a piece of digital infrastructure that reflects their belonging, that is stable and permanent, that does not require them to pay ongoing rent for the right to exist in their own community’s digital space.

We think that demand is legitimate. We think it reflects a genuine and underserved public interest in geographic namespaces — an interest that has been largely invisible because the commercial model has been so dominant for so long that it has come to seem like the natural state of things.

It is not the natural state of things. It is a governance choice. And like all governance choices, it can be revisited, critiqued, and changed.

Why this matters now more than ever

We are at a particular moment in the history of digital infrastructure — a moment when the underlying architecture is genuinely open to renegotiation. Blockchain technology has made permanent onchain ownership of digital assets practically possible in a way that it was not before. The old justifications for the rental model — that centralised registries need ongoing fees to maintain their infrastructure — are less compelling than they were when the only available model was a centralised database run by a private company.

The window for building geographic namespaces on different principles — on permanent ownership, on civic accessibility, on the stewardship model rather than the commercial model — is open. It will not stay open forever. Once the commercial model reasserts itself in the onchain space, as it inevitably will if civic actors do not claim their ground, the opportunity to do this differently will close.

We built Queensland’s geographic namespaces in this window. We built them with permanence, not rental. We built them with a price point that reflects civic access, not commercial extraction. We built them with the understanding that the names of real places are not products — they are part of the common heritage of the communities that gave them meaning.

And we built them because we believe, as a matter of basic civic principle, that the digital addresses of real places should belong to the people of those places — genuinely, permanently, and unconditionally — not to whoever is willing to pay the annual renewal fee.

On the obligation to get this right

We want to close by being honest about something.

Building geographic infrastructure carries an obligation that purely commercial products do not. When you build a road, people start driving on it. When you build a utility network, people start depending on it. When you build the namespace infrastructure for a community’s digital identity, you take on a responsibility that goes beyond commercial viability. You become part of the community’s infrastructure. And infrastructure has to be there tomorrow, and the day after, and the year after that.

We take that seriously. It is part of why we built this the way we did — with onchain permanence rather than centralised registry control, with one-time payment rather than annual fees, with governance that is not dependent on our continued commercial success. Because we know that the test of whether we built something in the public interest is not whether it succeeds commercially. The test is whether, decades from now, the people of Queensland look back and say: those addresses worked. They were permanent. They were accessible. They belonged to the community they represented.

That is the standard we are trying to meet. Not because it is easy. Because it is right.

Geographic namespaces are not products. They are civic infrastructure. They are part of how communities live in the digital world — how they present themselves, how they signal belonging, how they build presence and permanence in a medium that has historically treated all of those things as rentable, revisable, and ultimately contingent on commercial logic.

We think that is worth changing. And we think Queensland is exactly the right place to start.