Last I checked buying a gtld costs about 180k USD, and then 10k yearly, not that much considering the daily amount of rewards issued for content and curation.@dantheman: how about buying the .steem gtld domain extension, mapping domains xxx.steem to @xxx account pages on Steemit, and allowing each account to set DNS records for sub-domains of their own .steem domain?
I like this idea, but I think that @dan may be headed down the road of independent DNS registrations, outside of "regular old DNS".....
Which frees us from ICANN.
....WHICH ROCKS.
Nothing prevents having the gtld top-level DNS resolve domains using the blockchain register. Since Steemit would be owning it, they do what they want with it. The advantage of this approach is that even without specific code in the browser to intercept *.steem domain names, the request would still get resolved via the traditional DNS infrastructure, with records mapped 1:1 to that of the blockchain.