Oh, come on! With due respect to Matt's fantastic work in the past 20 years, this is no more and not less than merely a fantastic way of attracting media attention (namely, to WordPress.com status as a registrar — something that I have not known before!), because this is the kind of commitment that no company can truthfully and honestly comply with.

The best that Matt can offer for 38K is "if there is an Internet in 2123, and it uses paid-for domain names, and Automattic is still around, then we will stick to this agreement".

That's a lot of "ifs" for 38K.

After all, how many companies have been around for 100 years or more? Sure, there are a few; even if they might have changed names and branding and the corporate organisation, and still can trace their origin back to its founders, it's certainly possible that Automattic — or whatever company holds the rights to Automattic's work and has to honour their commitments — will be around.

But the whole concept of "Internet using domain names" might be so weird in 2123 as it is learning Morse code on a telegraph key in 2023. The simple truth is that we don't have any way to reasonably predict how the Internet will look like in a hundred years; it's even highly likely that the transmission technology will be so radically different that there will be no equivalent to what we have today.

Just think about using quantum entanglement for almost-infinite-distance and quasi-instantaneous transmission. It might be turned into an experimental technique by the 2060s, and, by the 2100s, everybody's mobile phone will incorporate it — and you'll enjoy instant point-to-point communication to anyone in the world (and outside it!) without the need of a 'mediator' or a middle-man such as the ICANN, the DNS system, or any sort of registrar; you might not even need what we would call a "telecommunications company" today; just something that flips an electron's spin in your pocket, and you're good to go.

Science fiction? Maybe. (Note: the hypothetic device that would allow point-to-point instant communication across very long distances is often called the ansible by science fiction authors; look it up!).

But remember that the concept of having AI displacing the jobs of creative people was science fiction in 2019. And now AI is "suddenly upon us", and people are being fired and replaced by ChatGPT. My point is just that we cannot even predict what advanced technology will be released upon us in the next few years, much less predict what things will look like in a hundred years from now.

Also, although you can hook up a Morse telegraph key to the Internet and send messages with it (or, rather, emulate how a telegraph key works) — even if it's pointless to do so these days; it would just be an amusing hobby to pursue — we cannot even predict if the same will be true of the telecommunication technology of the 2120s. The concept of "typing a domain name on a browser to open a web page" might be so alien in 2123 as setting up a telegraph key would be today. It might even work (who knows, we have retro-computing as a fad now, the same trend might be true in the 2120s) but be essentially useless; whatever domain name you buy in 2023 for a 100-year-period is almost certainly worthless in 2123. And of course Matt knows that very well.

While I can understand the need of rethinking about "lifetime" licenses, and I also agree that this "marketing stunt" of 100-year domain names is mostly to make Matt's point, the simple truth is that you're going to engage a contract where you'll pay 38K for something that you cannot be guaranteed that will be still existing in the next few decades. Even if such a contract gets clouded into thick legalese in order to pass consumer protection laws, it still remains to be challenged if such a contract is, in fact, a legally binding contract. I'm not a jurist, but I'm sure that jurists will love to take a look at what exactly Automattic will be providing as a service in return for your 38K.

The only way I can see this "gimmick" of Matt's actually having an impact is if he announces a "Foundation for the End of Life-Time Licenses", and the proceedings of those 100-year-domain-names would go towards a fund, or trust, to finance the activities of such a foundation (e.g., producing documentation about why lifetime licenses is a bad idea, sponsoring workshops and having evangelists giving lectures about the concept, etc. etc.)

Mind you, I'm not quite convinced that "lifetime licenses" is the nightmare that Matt believes it to be. The main question, from the perspective of the contract agreement, is whose "lifetime" we're talking about. The license buyers' lifetime? The lifetime of the company providing the product/service (and giving technical support to it)? Or simply the product's? Also — if someone buys a lifetime license, is that license inheritable by a living relative of the owner (usually, the answer is "no", i.e., such licenses tend to be non-transferable)? What if the license owner is a corporation, which might outlive the actual users of the license, the corporation's owners, or even the company which sold the license?

There are, for sure, some legal issues worthy of attention when talking about "lifetime licenses", and I totally agree that pointing them out and discussing them more openly and publicly is a good idea. I'm also fine with "marketing stunts" to make a point; and I'm also okay with the idea of getting donors towards a fund that will be managed by a non-profit that will engage the public in such discussions. All these are, in my non-jurist opinion, perfectly valid and reasonable methods to gather attention to an issue (which is worthy of discussion).

But if this is a "make-money-fast" scheme by Automattic to make them raise funds to shore up their market valuation... well, in that case, you'd be better off spending your 38K in the NFT/cryptocurrency Ponzi scheme while it's still legal — you'll have way more chances of getting some value there than with a license to use your domain name by 2123...