Almost all ‘lifetime subs’ are scams; a company has to be massive to support it and if it doesn’t work out for smaller companies, the consequences don’t matter anyway.
It doesn't actually have to be lifetime to be well worth it, though. For services with recurring fees there's obviously a break-even point that's simple to calculate. And often you can expect that recurring fee will increase at some point, so that break-even point will often come sooner than expected.
I bought an Emby Premier subscription 8 years ago for $120. You can also pay yearly at $55 dollars. So even if it's not _actually_ a "lifetime" it's been well worth it and pays for itself in a little over two years.
I took a lifetime VPN sub. It always puzzled me why they'd do that, what with the operational cost. It lasted a bit over 10y, which is still a good deal, but not lifetime.
Does failing after 10 years count as a failure? Cause living for the next 10 years is not really that difficult, and the relevant people will still likely be around.
Sure, the offer might as well be for 90 years, or even 50 years without much practical difference, but if it was a bit more honest and said "50 years", would you still call it a money grab?
The fact remains that this will be honored for as long as there are people interested in honoring it. This surely has some value, right?
Yeah, this is really, really, really dumb. There is no guarantee the USA will be around in 100 years (and honestly right now I wouldn't bet on the "staying around" side), let alone WordPress.
I think it should be illegal for companies to make any sort of guarantee like this longer than some specified timespan, backed up by some level of "corporate actuarial analysis" around how likely the company is to exist at the end of the term. Bankruptcies happen all the time and they essentially wipe out the claims of customers.
Domain names have existed for about 50 years [1], much longer than web browsers or blogs, so them being around for another 100 doesn't seem like a stretch. But I would agree that their relevance will diminish further.
A money grab from the people of WordPress? The company that has probably done the most for the development of the web? I find it hard to see it that way.
they have atleast ensured a great many people are dealing with regularly patching crap, and taking care of fallout, from what is arguably one of the most insecure piles of garbage EVER WRITTEN
$38k at 1% interest = $380 per year, forever. Current US Treasury rates are > 5%, meaning > $1900 per year. What is the overlap between people who have $38k disposable, don't realize this, and also think paying $38k for a Wordpress domain lease is a good idea? I can only assume this has to be some weird publicity stunt, which is probably quite clever, because here we are talking about Wordpress.
Re: An update about our Squatting Domains (formerly “Lifetime domains”)
Dear valued customers,
Due to unprecedented and frankly unforeseen inflation no really we couldn’t see that coming, we have decided that a small number of customers couldn’t be costing everyone else something, risking our whole company to go bankrupt, so we’ve decided to migrate every Squatting Domain to our new service at squatting.wordpress.com/[your account name]. Proud to offer the best customer service for a century!
Because WordPress.com is the .blog registry, I guess they could pull it off for .blog domains. Other tld registries have bitten dust already, and other registries have jacked up prices in the previous years. But even at a 10% increase a year (likely the case for .com), the domain renewals will cost about $5K for 100 years. With hosting, support, and WordPress being able to run for 100 years, I think that price is justified.
If ICANN screws WordPress, or whatever WordPress.com uses for hosting screws them, they will be in a mess.
Am I the only one horrified at the thought that people will still be using Wordpress in 100 years? I can't really imagine the world in which that happens, it has to have the kind of bleakness to it that in its own way surpasses cyberpunk dystopias.
Lots of people read something called the New York Times today, but it’s not printed on the same hot metal typesetting machine they used in 1923 (or printed at all).
Similarly it doesn’t seem too unlikely that people would be publishing on a platform called Wordpress in 2123.
If there’s anything left of the original PHP code, it will probably have been transformed and rewritten many times over by AI because we already have the capability for that, just missing some context window to process a Wordpress-sized code base.
The NYT is a media property and a trademark, they can choose to deliver their content on any platform they want.
Wordpress is one of such platforms to deliver content (like the hot metal typesetting machine). Other sites could still be around and ditch Wordpress for any other new platform that comes up. And GP would be horrified to think that 100 years from now, people would still use said platform to deliver their content.
The article is about Wordpress.com selling 100-year registrations.
Their platform is whatever they call “Wordpress”. In the same way, NYT on a phone app is conceptually the same NYT as the one printed in 1923, even if almost nothing in the production pipeline is the same.
Wordpress.com can change their technology without becoming something else.
They own the Wordpress trademark just like NYT owns theirs. Somebody who buys a 100-year registration from Wordpress will have the service delivered on whatever Wordpress has become by 2123.
Well, duh. If a company suddenly stopped selling the product that their users rely on, they would lose sales. This is hardly a revelation.
There are lots of examples of software platforms transitioning to a new foundation while retaining a compatibility shim for those bits of the old applications that customers still need. Text-mode COBOL applications are deployed on Windows 11, which itself has almost nothing in common with Windows 1.0.
Wordpress.com would need to maintain compatibility with some PHP+MySQL plugins. This doesn’t seem insurmountable, especially as AI code translation is now a thing.
> If WP becomes a different product (a static site generator for Rust, deployed with Kubernetes?), their customer base will drop to ~0 overnight.
You're imagining this change happening in a world where people still care about Wordpress.
Try imagining instead, a world where Wordpress is already a dead technology that nobody would use for a greenfield project, and it's only "legacy" sites that haven't been modified in 10 years (but which are owned by brick-and-mortar companies that continue faithfully paying the hosting bills every month) that are still hosted on Wordpress.com.
Can you not then see the value in some company buying up Wordpress.com, and migrating its customers over to a Wordpress-compatibility-shim over their own service that's based on a not-dead technology?
I'm not sure if you're being intentionally dense but predicting the future is hard and wordpress could be a package of gummy bears in 100 years. Nintendo used to sell cards or something. Yeah, wordpress is a technology but it also is a name and that name has value regardless if they technology stops working.
Windows 98 is a technology. Windows XP is a technology. Both share very little in common under the hood, one being descended from DOS and one from Windows NT. The customer doesn't care, to them it's still Windows as long as it looks and feels the same, and most of your old stuff still works.
Just because Wordpress 6.3 is a php monstrosity with a security-disaster-riddled ecosystem doesn't mean Wordpress 12 has to use php and can't have sandboxed extensions. For all we know, Wordpress 12 could be a fancy frontend for a static site generator (marketed as "ultra-caching" or whatever)
Wordpress-the-company owns the name "Wordpress." They can sell that trademark, and then whoever they sell it to can call something else "Wordpress", and the current technology would have to get a different name.
Take yourself back to 1960. Mankind has never once been to space, though there have been endless efforts to achieve such. The next year Yuri Gagarin becomes the first man in space, Alan Shepherd follows shortly behind him. The following year the President gives a riveting speech about putting a man on the Moon. 7 years later, we land the first man on the Moon. And then do it repeatedly - to the point that dozens of men have walked on the Moon. In 1971 we put the first space station into space, with men began living in it for weeks at a time.
All of that over ~1 decade. Can you even imagine where we'll be in 50 years?
According to the World Bank, global poverty has decreased by nearly 20% during that time; the rate of decrease for those in extreme poverty has been even greater.
That's something like a billion and a half people who absolutely think the world is different between 2013 and 2023.
It'd only be 1.5 billion people if 100% of the world was in poverty. They're referring to relative rates. E.g. if 5% of the world was in poverty and now it's 4% then you have a 20% decline. But the bigger point is to be wary of metrics. The overwhelming majority of global poverty comes from extremely rural locations where money has relatively little use, yet people get by quite comfortably.
Putting these people in an urban job where they then earn $3 a day is then considered progress, regardless of impact on quality of life. For instance the biggest contemporary driver in decline of poverty has been the rise of China. It saw people go from raising large families in rural areas to living in densely packed cities, making iPhones for $3 a day in factories surrounded by suicide nets.
I'm obviously not saying economic development is bad, but that measuring it by metrics is stupid, especially the way the World Bank does which is simply looking at a fixed level of $ consumption/production. What should matter is quality of life. That's obviously what you're referencing, but the metrics are not.
Brain uploads don't cheat death. Let's say you made a digital clone of your brain. Your last thought would be "oh shit I'm dying". The description of you is not the thing you inherently try to protect, but the physical brain itself. Your brain's contents change quite often compared to the medium.
This just boils down to the dualism/physicalism argument. Physicalists would say that the mind is software and state, and they can be copied or moved just like a VM can be moved (e.g. Vmotion) from one host to another without any internally perceived interruption. The brain is just the host.
The real answer is likely that consciousness is an emergent phenomenon. In reality there is no mystical magic that makes us special. There is no one right answer for "the best way to cheat death" because it's all about satisfying a moving target of how comfortable you are with the fact that there is nothing intrinsically special about consciousness. Saving the brain is at least a concrete thing that satisfies most interpretations of identity.
It may exists but I think it's very unlikely to maintain a significant market presence. I'm very curious how it's going to fare in the next 10 - 20 years though (I'm building a WordPress-related product and got a bit scared with ChatGPT). Maybe it's not even about WordPress but that the idea of a website as we know it now may become obsolete and most of casual web browsing will be done through an AI chat service. I think there's some chance that ecommerce websites would still exist, that the chat interface would be an inferior interface alternative and only play a supporting role.
You can't imagine that people will still be using something owned by a succession of companies which bought the other companies and their userbases to transfer them over to their own service while retaining the branding of the original, starting with another company buying Wordpress.com?
Does anyone trust them to maintain these for 100 years? This is a money grab - "Pay us up front for 100 years of service." No doubt the terms will include plenty of wiggleroom for the company to backtrack on these promises.
* we maintain multiple backups of your content across geographically distributed data center
* 24/7 Premier Support
* The very best managed WordPress experience with unmetered bandwidth, best-in-class speed, and unstoppable security bundled in one convenient package.
They own .blog so I am guessing they can at least keep that part of the bargain. As to what level of service they can maintain over 100 years, or whether the web as we know it will continue to exist, remains to be seen.
just like unlimited yahoo mail space, or google's unlimited email space or that airline from 80's that took back through technicalities the "lifetime" ticket, no?
I would not trust anything that's long term more than 10 years, and even that is a stretch. I agree with GP, it's a cash grab.
>or that airline from 80's that took back through technicalities the "lifetime" ticket, no
As far as I'm aware American Airlines only revoked two lifetime AAirpasses of the 60+ sold; both were accused of using their companion pass fraudulently. From what I remember one was accused of approaching people at the airport and attempting to sell his companion seat, the other was accused of using his companion pass to book a seat next to his for a nonexistent person so he wouldn't have to sit next to anyone.
We don’t even have to go back to the 80s to find this kind of impermanence.
When the war between Ukraine and Russia first started, energy prices in Europe skyrocketed, causing several utility companies to cancel their customers’ existing fixed-rate plans, to instead pass on all expenses.
Can you point to any archived material with that claim? Many of us have been around to remember everything from that time period, and they never made such a claim in my memory. When Gmail launched there was a very prominent bar graph at the bottom of every page that told you how much storage you were using and how much was available.
I was around at that time and I definitely remember the 'unlimited' phrase in the press. I'm sure youre also correct about the bar graph though. Although as I remember it they kept lifting the ceiling of that bar graph faster than anyone could fill it up
Plus consider how many people are going to really care about this deal being upheld in 100 years.
Say a buyer of this service dies in 50 years. Would their children and potential grandchildren want to take Wordpress to court over the $15,000 valued in 2023 dollars? I would assume not.
This is a terrible deal for a lot of people. Perhaps the better investment would be putting the $35,000 into buying land somewhere random and hope it appreciates in value for one's descendants.
Think about it for a second, some people may want their website to live on past their death. This is a way to keep the domain alive for at least 100 years.
Say 50-60 years pass. Wordpress gets acquired by a dodgy company who decides they're OK terminating this deal because they consider the risk of litigation low.
It would be difficult to know if Wordpress (or future acquiring company) is keeping their end of the deal after one's death.
If they could guarantee a site function for 100 years this could be an insane bargain if you’ve been anywhere near what a retainer with an agency would cost.
Wordpress has already been around one fifth of a century. Yet, it's quite something to appreciate the change that happened between the one tenth of a century before it, so, 1993, and it, so, 2003.
In that time we went from self (and often university) hosted HTML to self-publishing. And it wasn't just Wordpress. A plethora of single-writer and group publishing flourished in an incredibly brief period of time powered in large part by the sudden availability of low priced (and free) hosting and scriptable languages.
In comparison, the past 1/10th of a century has seen little. Choice of JS framework does not revolutionary change make. If anything, there's a now established no turning back movement from federalists, indeed a niche, a result of the swallowing creative and belching out stale innovation FAANGs+ have brought destructive force with. FB does nothing whatsoever now in social good that it didn't do a decade ago. Nor Google. Just as banks do good in facilitating individual with saving, loan and payment solutions, they get fucked up sometimes and in their chasing the last decimal point fuck up people's lives via markets; FAANGs are at the chasing the last decimal point in advertising but fucking up people's lives directly through their brains, and it's got a way to run.
Which roundabout wandering brings me to ask: Will the $100 be put in trust, or similar, to ride out the next revolutionary change in tech that may result in Wordpress no longer be around but some cash needs to be left over for hosting something. The past decade has been all but revolutionary and is no place to base an assumption on the volatility-in-tech two decades down the line.
Yeah, I doubt this is going to be hold for 100 years. WordPress itself? Maybe, it's certainly not the kind of software that goes out of fashion in a year or two like many frameworks of the day. But a paid service that's supposed to last 100 years (or heck, longer than 10 years in general) is very unlikely to stick around anywhere near as long as that. Something like 99% of companies will flat out not exist by the next century.
Oil was all the rage and had only started being massively available two decades ago.
Ford had recently started.
And IBM, then CTR, was just 12 years old.
I wonder how things will look in another 100 years. Perhaps the web won’t have changed much. Perhaps the mere concept of a CMS or human-written software will be laughable.
Unrelated, but funny enough to be worth mentioning, it appears IBM’s founder was the father of Fairchild Semi’s.
I forgot that Ford and IBM were 100+ years old. Huh, guess I can bring the list of companies I use that were around 100 years or more up to about 5 or 6 now.
And yeah things were very different back then, and will be in future too. I don't personally think we're ever going to be in a situation where no human written software will exist though. Human creativity and the ability to do things better don't seem to have too much in common (people still paint despite photography existing, plays are still performed despite film and television and people still work on games and software for systems released in the 80s and 90s simply because they can). But it may be niche at least.
I don't understand if this is a joke or a desperate attempt to collect money ...
Tomorrow morning (like any other company of course) Wordpress could go bankrupt and they promise to guarantee the status quo for the next 100 years ...
As someone who has just spent a week trying to integrate the Wordpress API into an external software, I really hoped that they would make an announcement that they have decided to fix all this incredible mess of many years old APIs, incredibly survived all the technological improvements and make a professional and exhaustive developer documentation ...
I don’t think the price is particularly good. Even if we value the domain at $30 per year, that still leaves $350 per year for hosting and support.
I’d expect to be able to host a bunch of century Wordpress sites for very very cheaply, provided you locked down plugin installation (I don’t see how third party plugins could possibly work on sites expected to be that long-lived). Without plugins they’re a known security and upgrade profile, and I expect traffic on 99.95% of them to be effectively nil or highly cacheable.
Support is a bit harder to quantify, but I still would expect that most sites will just quietly chug along and support events will be rare (and again, you’re supporting a very well-known software profile).
To that end the price feels a bit outlandish to me.
That's insanity. I would rather bet on Cloudflare to be around longer. They don't add any additional up-charge from the baseline ICANN price. Before, I was buying 10 years of registration for a bit of a discount, but, after 20 years, I've switched over to single year with CF. What value does Wordpress bring for $380/yr? That's crazy.
You don't think Cloudflare will have a vc catchup moment where they jack up prices when they have a certain reach? Or they won't get purchased by a bigger entity or the US military?
Cloudflare will not be the same in 10 years. I doubt it will exist as the cloudflare we know today.
> I doubt it will exist as the cloudflare we know today
Well, I can't predict the future, but I think CF is one of the good ones. I bet on them more than most. They have been pretty consistent with being benevolent for the internet. But you seem to feel differently. Have they rubbed you the wrong way somehow? Why would they allow the US military to buy them out?
Any “forever” or “unlimited” are forms of a Ponzi scheme.
Note: I not saying Wordpress is being malicious. I’m just saying that for the economics of a “forever” or “unlimited” to work, you need to find new money to offset the old costs - and a lot of really good companies have had to learn this lesson the hard way.
Lots of businesses require new money to offset old costs - that's not fraud.
Companies also sell products and services below cost to build their brand and/or upsell the customers later.
I don't know WP's cost breakdown, but registering and hosting domains is relatively inexpensive and will likely get (relatively) cheaper in later decades. Meanwhile, they have a customer locked in for 100 years who will have a sunk cost incentive to purchase new features through WP rather than setting up a new domain somewhere else.
I really don't like the idea of the lump sum for 100 years of service upfront.
(Put loosely, what if they blow it all on executive bonuses the first few years of ramp-up, run out of suckers, and then have no funds to actually provide the service for the next 97 years. I'm not an accountant, but I'd guess not a lot of businesses would want to have 97 years of obligations without recurring revenue, and actually intending and able to honor those obligations.)
What about treat it more like a life insurance policy: you pay monthly/yearly premiums as long as you're alive, and the "lifetime" only kicks in when you die? And the dotcom company covers the "lifetime" part with its own ample insurance, from some company that's been around since the figurative stone age, and won't likely fail until the next stone age?
That spreads out recurring revenue for the company into something plausibly sustainable longer, increases the pool of sales prospects who could afford to buy into this (sales is a different matter), and increases the chance that this service will actually be provided in the end.
(Assuming that they want this to work, and it's not a PR tactic to promote a visionary CEO image.)
Customer lock in? Who owns the domain, the customer or wordpress?
IMO never tie your domain registration to your hosting or any other service you run through that domain. You'll regret it as soon as you need to move something.
This is a nice gesture and I hope this really works out. However, one should keep in mind that things changes and be ready for that too. Here are two examples;
Network Solutions 100-year domain registration[1][1a] and Evernote's 100-Year Plan[2][2a].
I expect $38k is enough to set up a proper trust to run indefinitely.
I would assume that any company offering this sort of approach would have a trust set up to ensure it can keep its promise. (Ex: invest in S&P and draw off 3% each year to cover maintenance and upkeep)
That’s how I would do it, at least.
The fact that Wordpress doesn’t detail anything like this has me doubting though.
Things are not nearly as predictable 100 years out as they are 1 or 10.
A 100-year plan is for WordPress.com's benefit, not yours. They get a predictable accounting revenue stream for 100 years if they continue to exist; if not, no problem for them, they still got the money, while you get nothing (or whatever a bankruptcy court says). You get... hosting for 100 years. Maybe. What are the odds, and are you factoring that into the price you pay?
It reminds me of file locker sites' "lifetime subscriptions", which amount to however long they continue to operate before the owners lose interest in the hassle or get sued and have to shut down.
This implies that WordPress has figured out how to guarantee their company will be alive and functional in 100 years. They should sell that as a service!
I'd like to imagine we'd be domain-less in 100 years
Obviously cannot envision what would replace it by then but our interfaces will be completely different, not just full effortless voice interaction with AI but probably gestures and anticipation analysis.
Imagine the computing power in a penny sized node and the battery would be your body or radio frequency airwaves or solar or kinetics, everything it can absorb.
And this is an excellent way for WordPress to talk about stability and disaster recovery... in ways that aren't nearly as boring as we've done in the past. It's just adding a human spin to why dev ops and infrastructure and security matters. =P
"100 years" is a much better way of saying "5-9s!" Ha.
Seems likely to me. It's twenty years old and powers >40% of the internet. Old software that reaches that level of adoption for so long has great sticking power.
Edit: I suppose the parent meant WordPress.com, the commercial organization that's making this offer, not the open source software itself.
It’s like the Ford Edsel; WordPress is so wrapped up in their own technology and echo chamber that they won’t even see a better product coming to the market with features that customers are actually asking for.
It’s about using the latest cutting edge technology to build the best possible web application for uses.
“Best” as in; Perfect SEO, Simple theming, Fastest loading possible, Secure, Simple and affordable hosting, and so on.
WordPress is very dated, and they are very comfortable in their niche. The reason they maintain the market share that they do is because there just isn’t a better option for users currently.
But to address your static comment; It in my opinion that most most blog sites store static text that never changes in a database, and a backend server has to query for data and return it to the frontend.
This workflow seems a bit overly complex when I could just store the text in a document, and eliminate the need for a backend server or database.
The internet as we know it was created so that CERN could share static text documents with others. Why don’t we bring the web back to that?
> Fastest loading possible, Secure, Simple and affordable hosting, and so on.
You know that WordPress is actually fast, right? A vanilla install on a crappy $2 a month server will return a response in a few ms.
The problem with WordPress are the plugins and the lack of vetting/rules/oversight. And when they do apply their rules, they apply them in ridiculous ways -- for example, I submitted a plugin that was a wrapper around an open source project, with the project's permission, and was denied because I wasn't the author of the project and the author of the project had no desire to interact with shenanigans like that.
These plugins can do virtually anything and do really "bad" (as in performance and security) things.
If you are doing everything in-house and at least reading/contributing to the plugin code before accepting an external plugin, you can host very performant websites.
I'd even venture to suspect that all these plugins is an indication that people want more functionality than can ever be achieved in a competitor ... but to be clear, there are some pretty solid competitors. These competitors are entirely closed-source, so, choose your poison I guess.
> Why don’t we bring the web back to that?
I know people who host an entire school (very niche skill) online. Their entire thing is built on WordPress. I know of quite a few sites actually running their entire user-facing stack on WordPress (usually with a backend API running Go/C# or something). I even know of some very popular money-management apps where the entire app is just running in WordPress.
The internet isn't just static pages, that ship sailed 3+ decades ago.
Yes, but static sites aren't even a competition with WordPress. WordPress doesn't do anything with static site hosting. I'm not precisely defending WordPress here though, I'm just pointing out that I feel like you're comparing Apples to Oranges.
Reach out to me via email, I used to work at Automattic/WordPress.com and I'd love to hear more about what you're working on.
if you want your stuff to stay online for 100 years, then the question should be: is this wordpress deal the most likely way to achieve that (within your budget).
Do you know of an option that is more likely to succeed, for the money?
After a frustrating incident long ago where my domain was registered at the same place that hosted my site -- and the host went dark -- I never register my domain with the same company that hosts my site. I'm on WordPress.com Business now, so no thanks to your offer, WordPress.
ICANN does not allow the expiration date on a domain registration to be more than 10 years in the future.
Unless they made some special deal with ICANN, what Wordpress is almost certainly doing is the same thing Network Solutions does (or did? [1]) for their 100 year registration product. Register it for 10 years, and then add more years every so often over the next 100 years to keep pushing the expiration date out (but never farther out than 10 years) until the expiration date reaches 100 years from the start.
[1] I'm not sure Network Solutions still offers 100 years. I just checked and it only offered up to 10 years for the domain itself. It offered up to 100 years on some of their add-ons such as their private registration option.
According to W3techs, WordPress CMS usage & market share have stagnated lately (starting in 2022) and actually began to decline for the first time.
This is a serious milestone, ending their sustained 10% growth streak that they have been riding for years. Inside the company, this must have raised red alarms and made them start looking for new plans.
It’s a patently obvious money grab or scam or PR attempt because there’s no way in hell Wordpress will be around in 30 years let alone a hundred.
But that got me thinking. Will the web itself be around a century from now? ICANN? HTML? HTTP? A hundred years ago there were no transatlantic flights. The television hadn’t been invented yet. What will the next hundred years bring? Kind of thought provoking really. Good weekend musings.
Around 2002, there was a startup that funded itself by offering "lifetime" hosting for $500. I think it was called "textdrive". Anyway I bought it and it lasted about 8 years. The company went under or got bought out or something. Still not a bad price on a monthly basis.
Anyway, If you get this, don't be surprised if it only lasts a decade or two.
> This reminds me of a café in Lausanne that started operations by selling lifetime, three-coffees-per-month subscriptions, and then after a year or so "management changed" and they annulled all subscriptions :D
This is one of the major differences between digital and paper: digital requires constant upkeep.
If you'd replace the inscriptions on pyrymids and obelisks as well as the various old documents with their digital equivalent we'd have lost them long ago. And they will still be there long after their current digital equivalents have turned to dust. The only defense that digital has is boundless copies, in the hope that some of them survive. But the chances of any particular copy surviving very long is nil and even if it does it is probably going to be unreadable so you need to keep copying.
There are a lot of forces that would love to see the IA disappear. I wouldn't bet on them any more than I would on any other copy. If you really think something is worth preserving print it out on acid free paper or archival quality microfiche.
Those forces are not against the website preservation part of IA, only their “digital library” part where they provide access to copyrighted material for free.
I seriously doubt even if IA lost a bunch of lawsuits would your archived website be in any danger, as there are many many interested parties (including nation states) who are keen to keep the archived websites from disappearing as they are an important public resource.
without any language specifying what would be their way to re-pay the customer in case of anything happens to prevent them from fulfilling the 100year contract, i would not pay a dime for this.
100 years is long enough that the consequences of failure are nil. Nobody who is pushing this program will be alive to deal with any fallout.
It reminds me of the subtle attitude of people making poor engineering decisions because they’ll be long gone by the time payment comes due.