# A State Shouldn't Rent Its Own Name

Every government depends on names it does not own — domains, addresses, the digital identifiers its institutions run on — leased from registrars that can revoke or expire them. That dependency is invisible right up until the day it isn't. Here is why a State renting its own foundation is a fragility worth taking seriously, and what owning it outright would actually mean.

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Ask a government official who owns the name their department runs on, and you will usually get a puzzled look. The name is just there. It has always been there. It appears on the letterhead, in the email addresses, on the website, in the systems that talk to other systems. Nobody thinks about who *owns* it, in the way nobody thinks about who owns the air in a room — until the room is sealed and the air starts to matter.

But someone does own it. Not the government. A registrar does — a private entity, somewhere, that leases the name to the institution on terms, for a period, subject to renewal, revocation, and rules the institution did not write and cannot change. The State does not own the name at the base of its own digital existence. It rents it. And it rents it from a chain of intermediaries that, on any ordinary day, works perfectly well and is therefore completely invisible.

This article is about that invisible dependency, and why I think it is a genuine fragility rather than a technicality — the kind of thing that is fine for years and then, in the wrong circumstance, is not fine at all. I am not interested in alarmism. Registrars are not villains and the system does not fail every day. I am interested in the structural fact that a State's foundation is something it does not own, and in what it would mean to change that — to build the base layer so that a government holds it outright, the way a government ought to hold the things it truly depends on.

## What a Name Actually Holds Up

Start with what is resting on the name, because the weight is easy to underestimate.

A name is not just a label on a website. It is the anchor for a whole stack of things a government does. Email flows through it — every official message, every credential sent to a citizen, every internal communication, tied to the name and trusted because of it. Identity hangs off it — when an institution proves it is itself, it does so through the name; when a citizen checks that a message really came from the government, they check the name. Increasingly, payments route through names, and services resolve through them, and the trust that citizens place in "this is really my government talking to me" ultimately rests on the name being what it claims to be, controlled by who it should be controlled by.

So the name is not a surface detail. It is the base layer — the thing everything else hangs off. Identity, communication, trust, and increasingly money, all trace down to the name at the root. And that root, for essentially every government in the world, is rented. The most load-bearing element of the digital State is the one it owns least.

This is the asymmetry that should give pause. We are careful about owning the things we depend on. A government owns its buildings, its land, its critical physical infrastructure, precisely because depending on something you do not own is a vulnerability. Yet the digital foundation — arguably now as critical as any building — is leased, and the leasing is so normal that the question of ownership barely comes up. The dependency grew faster than the instinct to secure it.

## The Anatomy of a Rented Foundation

To see why renting the base layer is fragile, look at what the lease actually involves.

A name is held through a registrar, under a registration that must be renewed. Renewal can be missed — through administrative error, through a lapsed payment, through the simple failure of a process in a large organisation where responsibility for one small recurring task got lost between departments. A missed renewal can mean the name lapses, becomes available, and is taken by someone else. This is not hypothetical; organisations far more focused than governments have lost critical names to a forgotten renewal.

A name can also be revoked or suspended. The registrar operates under rules and jurisdictions and pressures of its own. A dispute, a legal order, a policy change, a compliance action somewhere up the chain — any of these can result in a name being frozen or pulled, on a timescale and by a decision the institution using the name does not control. Most of the time this machinery points in benign directions. But its existence means the name is held at the sufferance of parties outside the institution, and "held at someone else's sufferance" is the definition of a dependency you do not control.

And the whole arrangement sits on top of intermediaries — the registrar, the registry above it, the systems that resolve the name — each a link in a chain, each a point where something can fail, be pressured, or change its terms. The government at the bottom of this stack experiences the name as simply working, because on ordinary days it does. But the number of parties who *could* affect the name, and the small number of those parties who are the government itself, is the measure of how little the foundation is actually owned.

## The Day It Stops Being Invisible

Dependencies like this have a characteristic shape: they cost nothing for years and then, on one bad day, cost everything at once. The fragility is not visible in the ordinary case. It is visible only in the failure case, which is rare — and rareness is exactly what makes it easy to keep ignoring.

Imagine the failure, though, because a government's job is partly to imagine failures other people find too unlikely to plan for. The name that anchors a department's identity lapses, or is frozen, or is disputed. Suddenly the email addresses that citizens trust are in question. The website that proves the institution is itself is unreachable or, worse, resolves somewhere else. The digital identity of a public institution — the thing citizens rely on to know they are dealing with the real government — is compromised, not through a dramatic hack, but through the quiet failure of a lease the institution never fully controlled.

The damage in that scenario is not just operational. It is a crisis of trust. The entire value of a government's name is that citizens can rely on it to mean what it says. The moment that reliability is in doubt — the moment a citizen has to wonder whether the message, the site, the credential is really from the government — a foundational trust has cracked, and foundational trust is far harder to rebuild than any system. The rented foundation fails rarely, but when it fails, it fails at the one layer where failure is most expensive: the layer where citizens decide whether to believe their own State.

## What Owning It Outright Would Mean

Now consider the alternative: a State that owns the base layer, rather than renting it.

Owning it outright means the name is held permanently, not leased for a period. There is no renewal to miss, because there is nothing to renew — the name is held, not rented, and holding does not lapse. There is no registrar with the power to revoke or freeze it, because the name is not held at anyone's sufferance; it is held directly, by the institution, in a way that no external party can withdraw. The chain of intermediaries who could each affect the name collapses to one party: the State itself. The foundation stops being a dependency on others and becomes a possession, in the full sense — a thing the government controls the way it controls its buildings and its land.

This is what it means for a State's name to be *sovereign*: not merely that the government uses it, but that the government owns it, permanently and unconditionally, with no external party able to revoke, expire, or interfere with it. The name resolves because the State holds it, not because a registrar continues to permit it. The trust citizens place in the name rests on the State's own control of it, not on a chain of private intermediaries behaving well. The foundation is owned, and because it is owned, it is not fragile in the specific way that renting made it fragile.

The technology that makes this possible is onchain ownership — names held permanently on a public ledger, resolving without a registrar, controlled by whoever holds them and by no one else. I will not turn this into a technical piece; the mechanics belong below the floor. What matters at the level of policy is the property the mechanics deliver: a name a government can hold outright, that no one can revoke or expire, that depends on no intermediary's continued permission. That property is not available in the rented model at any price. It is a different kind of ownership, and it is the kind a State should have over its own foundation.

## Why This Is Not a Small Upgrade

It would be easy to frame this as a minor infrastructural improvement — swap a rented name for an owned one, tidy up a dependency, move on. I think that framing misses the scale of what is at stake, so let me state it plainly.

The base layer of a State's digital existence is becoming as critical as its physical infrastructure, and it is the one piece of critical infrastructure that governments do not own. That is a structural anomaly. We would not accept a government that leased its parliament building from a private landlord who could change the locks; we understand instinctively that the seat of a State's function should be owned by the State. The digital foundation deserves the same instinct, and it has not yet received it, only because the dependency is newer than the instinct and has not yet had its bad day in public.

Fixing it is not an upgrade to a system. It is closing a gap in sovereignty. A State that rents its own name has outsourced control of its foundation to parties outside itself, and it has done so invisibly, without ever deciding to. Bringing that foundation in-house — owning it outright, permanently, revocable by no one — is not tidying up. It is a government taking possession of something it always should have owned and never quite did. That is a sovereignty question, not an IT question, and it deserves to be treated with the seriousness sovereignty questions get.

## The Objection: Isn't This Just Trading One Dependency for Another?

The sharpest objection a careful official will raise is this: you say renting from a registrar is a dependency, but isn't holding a name on a public ledger just a different dependency — on the ledger, on the technology, on whoever maintains it? Have you removed the reliance on outside parties, or merely moved it?

It is the right question, and the answer turns on a real distinction. A registrar is a *discretionary* intermediary: it holds power over your name and can choose to exercise that power — to revoke, to freeze, to change terms, to enforce a decision from up its chain. Your name is subject to someone's ongoing judgement. A public ledger is not discretionary in that way. It does not have an owner who can decide to revoke your name; it enforces the rule that whoever holds a name controls it, without exception and without judgement, the same way for a government as for anyone else. The dependency shifts from *a party with discretion over you* to *a neutral rule that applies to everyone equally.*

That is not the same kind of dependency, and the difference is exactly the one that matters for sovereignty. Depending on a neutral rule that no one can bend against you is categorically different from depending on a party who can choose to act against you. The first is like depending on the law of gravity; the second is like depending on a landlord's goodwill. Both are dependencies in a loose sense, but only one leaves your foundation subject to another party's decisions. Owning a name onchain removes the discretionary intermediary and replaces it with an impartial rule — and removing discretion over your foundation is precisely what sovereignty means. So no, it is not trading one dependency for an equivalent one. It is trading a master for a law.

## What This Asks of a Government

None of this happens by itself, and it would be dishonest to present sovereign naming as a thing a State simply switches on. It asks something of a government: the willingness to treat its digital foundation as critical infrastructure and to take ownership of it deliberately, the way it takes ownership of other critical things.

That is partly a technical undertaking, but mostly it is a decision — a recognition that the base layer matters enough to own, and a choice to own it before circumstances force the question. The technical work of minting the core names, making them resolve, and holding them securely is real but bounded; it is the kind of thing that can be built and handed over. The harder part is the shift in thinking: seeing the name not as a piece of IT administration to be outsourced and forgotten, but as sovereign infrastructure to be held and defended like any other foundation of the State.

My role, as I see it, is to make the decision as easy as possible by doing the building in advance. The core Queensland names can be minted, made permanent, made to resolve, and prepared to be handed over as owned infrastructure — so that what is asked of the government is not a construction project but a choice to take possession of something already built for exactly that purpose. Sovereignty over the foundation should not require a State to become an expert in the underlying technology. It should require only that the State decide its foundation is worth owning, and accept the keys. Building it so that acceptance is all that is asked — that is the work, and it is the work I have chosen to aim at this State.

## Building It Before the Bad Day

The frustrating thing about invisible fragilities is that the time to fix them is always *before* the failure that makes them visible, and before the failure there is never any urgency. Everything works. The name resolves. The dependency costs nothing. Why act?

The answer is that foundations are exactly the things you secure in advance, because securing them afterward means securing them in the middle of a crisis, which is the worst possible time. The right moment to own your name is while it is still working perfectly, precisely because you can do it calmly, deliberately, as an act of foresight rather than an act of panic. Sovereignty over your foundation is cheap insurance bought before the storm and impossibly expensive bought during it.

This is why the core names of a State can and should be minted onchain now, while the question is theoretical — permanent, resolving, owned outright, held by no registrar and revocable by no one, ready to be handed to the State as infrastructure it fully controls. Not because the rented foundation is failing today. Because the time to own your foundation is before you need to, and a government that waits for the bad day to care about who owns its name has waited exactly one day too long.

A State should not rent the thing everything else hangs off. It should own it. And owning it is possible now, quietly, in advance — which is the only good time to secure a foundation there is.