> If you're starting a new commercial venture, something that cost $1000 and took a week would still be one of the cheapest and fastest parts of that process.

That's highly dependent on where you live.

I don't agree with the 3rd level domain structure. In fact, I don't think ICANN should allow registrars to sell those without clear disclosure informing registrants they're not ICANN domains. At the very least, registrars shouldn't be doing that to their customers.

In terms of abuse handling, you don't want to be a sibling to some unknown person or entity.

> Under the 'modern' system, the problem of "who do we need to contact about an obvious scam site" has been pushed up to the largest possible scale - the GTLD registries, whereas a scammer abusing a "free subdomain" would be shut down by the admins at that second level.

But I want my legitimate domain pushed up to the largest possible scale with a clear set of rules and independence from other registrants. In terms of governance, the average registrant couldn't tell you the difference between a 2nd level domain and a 3rd level domain and the 3rd level domain comes along with additional risk.

As soon as you add 3rd level domains, that's an extra party that can drop your domain. The 3rd level domain providers don't have a standard abuse handling mechanism. I think most of them try to defer to ICANN's rules, but there's nothing that says they must do that. As far as I know, ICANN only deals in TLDs [1].

What happens if you're on a 3rd level domain, there's an influx of abusive behavior by sibling domains, and the 2nd level owner doesn't do a good job of handling it? Does the 2nd level domain get banned by the gTLD? What kind of collateral damage does that cause?

Maybe you create something like the public suffix list, but then it's the same problem with more complexity regarding responsibilities.

I do agree with the general sentiment of letting people pay to prove trust. I think it's really hard to come up with a number that makes sense, but I'd be willing to pay $X into an abuse handling fund if it bought me extra trust for my domain(s).

1. https://www.icann.org/en/contracted-parties/registry-operato...