Why should I pay for a name?

Did I pay for my own name when I was born? No. Did you? I suppose not.
Why should we do it for a domain name?
I know, I know ... somebody provides a service. Well ... if we think a little we might found out that most people don't know what they are paying for and much more do not need the provided services.
Simply put we pay for somebody to intercept the request for your domain name and redirect that request to the registered IP. Who's doing that interception? Well ... actually the first server between you and the rest of the Internet is asking for directions to a bigger server until it finds out where you have to go and send you back the answer. Everybody can chose the name he wants as long as it was not already taken by somebody.
Very nice until now. Very nice until you ask yourself if you really need that and if the solution is really good?
It is used by people who one way or another know about my internet name and they trust that name already.

If the name is taken by somebody evil nobody can do anything about that.

That's OK but the personal names use a simpler method. When you meet somebody you don't know his name ... it is simply "that person". When you want to know his name you ask somebody you already know.
This way you find out not only the name of the persons bu also gather some opinions about that person, if it can be trusted and so on.
We already use that system on the internet because we ask Google for directions. Most users I meet do not enter the domain name in the address bar but in the search field in Google interface. They search for that name and then click on the associated link. The reasons for that are very different. Some do not trust their typing skills, others do not know about the address bar, etc.
Do we pay google for this service? Of course not. They earn tons of money from other sources.


Why should we pay a domain registrar and others in their ecosystem for services that can be obtain very easy the other way?
It is simply stupid.

Instead we can imagine an internet where you ask somebody you know to tell you who is the server with the name we heard about. The person we ask can be a big company like Google or a friend who offer such directions for a specific domain because he is an expert in that field. This way the internet becomes a much more trusted source because the name itself has to be recognized by some providers of directions.