Dear King Charles, here's a domain for Christmas

I'm giving King Charles this gift to raise awareness of how much creators depend on platforms

This is an open letter to King Charles as part of Challenge 1. Read the whole letter below:

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Dear King Charles,

Hope you’re well!

I’m writing to give you a gift for Christmas in the form of a web domain:

KingCharl.es

I bought this domain specifically to give to you. It might sound like an odd gift, but let me explain:

I’m a British internet writer and thinker, and I’m fed up with the way that Big Tech platforms like Instagram, TikTok, YouTube and Spotify control people who create the content that makes them successful.

When you use these platforms, you build a following. But you can’t take the followers anywhere with you, so you are basically trapped on the platform.

That’s a very big problem if at some point the platform decides to charge you money to show your content to all of your followers (like Instagram and Facebook), or starts degrading in quality (like Twitter).

Hundreds of thousands of British creators, most of them tiny independent outfits, rely on these platforms for a living, and wake up every day hoping the platform is still looking benevolently down on them.

Fortunately, over the last few years some of them have taken the plunge and moved away from these platforms to talk directly to their followers over email using newsletter subscription tools like Substack.

For example, Sir Lawrence Freedman, knighted by the Queen in 2003, who writes a successful blog on Substack with his son Sam. Sir Lawrence and Sam can take their blog followers anywhere they like.

But while creators operating inside Big Tech platforms can easily market their presence with a handle (usually starting with ‘@’), there is no established way for creators outside of Big Tech platforms to name themselves so it’s obvious where people should follow them.

That’s why I’ve created the concept of a linkname — a name that’s also a website.

Linknames have already existed for a while, but without a term to describe them.

will.i.am from the Black Eyed Peas is a great example of a linkname. His fans can go directly to the website will.i.am, which he owns, and interact with him however he chooses.

Which brings me to KingCharl.es.

My cheeky suggestion is that, with the web domain I am giving as a gift, you consider renaming yourself to the linkname KingCharl.es so that your followers can interact with you directly.

Of course, as someone who I think we can all agree is fairly well-known, there’s actually no reason you should do this.

But I suggested it to make an important point: imagine if you were instead someone building their career from creating content: a musician, artist, or vlogger for instance.

Naming yourself in a way that is also clearly a website would mean that wherever you use your name, people would know how to find you.

You’d have no need to separately highlight your website — the linkname on its own would do.

Better yet, the fact that you used a linkname would let your followers know that you prefer to interact with them outside of Big Tech platforms, on your own website.

So, back to the real world: what I’m hoping is not that you rename yourself, or create a website, or anything like that at all.

What I’m hoping is simply that you’ll accept this gift to raise awareness of the linkname as a Great British Invention: to help British creators, and indeed all creators worldwide, to rely less on Big Tech platforms.

If you’d be happy to accept, put your IT team in touch with me and I’ll get KingCharl.es transferred over straight away.

Or if it’s more convenient, I’m happy to manage the domain in perpetuity and point it to the website royal.uk — whatever you prefer.

Either way, I wish you a very merry Christmas!

All the best,

Louis Barclay

hi@louis.work

P.S. I’ve written more about what linknames are at the website linknam.es