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ADR 0020 — Canonical domain: freedback.net

• Status: accepted
• Date: 2026-06-21
• Supersedes: the placeholder freedback.org base used through M1–M10.
• Relates to: the stable-URL policy (CLAUDE.md), ADR 0011 (pinned @context), docs/naming.md.

Context

The protocol's IRIs — the freedback: namespace, the @context URL, and the dcterms:conformsTo profile — were pinned under a freedback.org base that the project did not own (and freedback.org was never verified at a registrar). freedback.dev is taken by an unrelated dormant npm homonym (docs/naming.md). The owner has now registered freedback.net.

Because only id and signature are stripped before canonicalization (canonical.rs), the @context URL and conformsTo value are part of the RFC 8785 bytes that are hashed (dedup id) and signed. The base domain is therefore content-affecting: it is cheap to change now (nothing is released) and expensive later (stable-URL policy). This is the moment to set it.

Decision

Adopt freedback.net as the single canonical base everywhere:

• protocol-lib::context: FREEDBACK = https://freedback.net/ns#, CONTEXT_URL = https://freedback.net/ns/context.jsonld, PROFILE_URL = https://freedback.net/profile/1.
• The served artifacts (ontology/context.jsonld, freedback.ttl, shapes.ttl), the SHACL shape targets, the RDF mapping, the widget JS (ANNO_CTX/PROFILE), the Firefox extension, and all docs use freedback.net.
• GitHub Pages (pages.yml) serves them at the matching URLs and writes a CNAME of freedback.net; docs/deployment.md documents the DNS + repo settings the owner completes to attach the domain.

The committed browser-signed interop fixture (widget-signed.json) was regenerated with the widget's own ES256 signer over the new bytes (a fresh test keypair), since the old signature was over freedback.org bytes.

Consequences

• All content addresses (dedup ids) and self-signatures are now computed over freedback.net IRIs. As nothing was released, there is no migration burden; going forward the stable-URL policy applies to freedback.net and these URLs MUST NOT change incompatibly.
• The protocol artifacts resolve at their pinned URLs once DNS is attached; until then they are reachable at the *.github.io Pages URL.
• freedback.org no longer appears anywhere in the tree.