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Comment by csours | Hacker News Reader

https://www.icann.org/news/blog/the-problem-with-the-seven-k...

Hoisting my pitchfork a bit, but the internet might be better off without hierarchical DNS. I certainly wouldn't call that "the world ending."

So we run into the age-old problem of "who decides". Also, how do we prevent fragmentation when there is disagreement.

Freedom isn't free. Web of trust.

Inconvenient, but that's a price I'm willing to pay for a network that empowers users rather than commercial interests.

Hmm. My issue with that is a majority consensus could decide that, for instance, .gov domains should no longer be relegated to the American government. Same issue as with a crypto 51% takeover.

> Hmm. My issue with that is a majority consensus could decide that, for instance, .gov domains should no longer be relegated to the American government. Same issue as with a crypto 51% takeover.

I'm sure other countries would like to use .gov.

They are entitled to their opinion; I saw a lot of this on the .amazon thread yesterday. However, right now, it's used by America only. There are some perks to inventing the internet.

My point is I don't like a system in which the majority can decide they don't like you having something and take it. For instance, what if people decided they didn't like facebook, so decided to seize its domain?

It's used by America only because America made the rules. That's not a great justification for the system as it stands.

Are there any examples of longstanding institutions that are _not_ beholden to the will of the many? All things fall if you can get enough people to revolt.

Web of trust is not consensus.

Fragmenting and an inability to formulate a standard answer when communicating are serious issues with using it, but a takeover is not.

If Chinese users would rather trust some Chinese government entity to resolve URLs, then that's what they'd get. At the same time as other users might get something else.

The flaw here is that very few of the people who use and enjoy that internet are willing to pay that same price.

All is not lost though. You can always opt out and run your own DNS or use hostfiles. Then you can have the internet you want and everyone the can have the internet they want.

Other than "not enough people are interested" what is stopping you or any group of people from using such a decentralized system as your primary name resolver today? I.e. if it's not in the web of trust use existing DNS as a fallback and watch it grow. I'm not sure I'd trust such a system to prevent banksite.com from being hijacked but I don't need to for you to.

Needs more blockchain

https://www.namecoin.org/

Wow I've got some beachfront property in Nevada to sell you if you think the "web of trust" actually addressed any credible threat model.

Not a threat model, but gives me freedom to decide whom I trust.

That's precisely what it doesn't do. It's a transitive trust relationship.

Content-addressable schemes seem to be pretty effective in their respective niches. You lose the semantic component of dns, though. Perhaps you could add some sort of local name pinning.

If we imagine the internet is going to keep expanding at anywhere near its historical rate it seems like we might have to let go of the idea of letting a single entity universally control a namespace.

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