Thinking through a way to fund a free web domain service for art projects. Maybe grant funded and limited to social practices kinds of work, or perhaps a partnership with a registrar/hosting service that acts like a gateway drug?

Or actually, imagine a speculation based service: you get free domains for a year, but the service actually owns the domain, at the end of the year, if the project is going well, you will pay a higher fee to buy the domain from the service.

The service watches stats/traffic on that domain and determines price based on that value.

It’s not even really the issue of paying for a new domain with each idea, it’s the hassle of the process. Maybe a prepaid bundle of domains would be a better way to think about this? Some service offers you domains by the dozen, for cheap, you prepay, and can create/get those dozen in any quantity at any time over the established time period. Like all pre pay models, part of the sustainability of this would be the assumption that not all prepaid domains would be claimed/used.

I simply think more artists need to be on the web, doing work that works well with the web.