Hacker News Reader

Comment by ohazi | Hacker News Reader

This is not going to end. ICANN has revealed their hand -- they are corrupt.

But we don't actually need them. What we do need is a "Let's Encrypt" style initiative to replace the DNS roots in their entirety, run by competent, principled people.

It would be difficult, but the people who are pissed off about this have clout at Google, Microsoft, and Mozilla (the web browser gatekeepers) and might actually be able to pull this off.

There is no legal requirement that ICANN has to run this system. It's just a historical convention. We've successfully taken out arrogant/incompetent (billion dollar) certificate businesses -- I think trying to get ICANN to blink would be a good goal.

View on HN

To be clear, I don't think it will come to this. But right now, ICANN believes that they can get away with anything, and have started to act on that belief.

We should begin the process of scaring them back on track. Start brainstorming. Start writing IETF proposals that prominently feature removing ICANN from the loop. Come up with ideas for migrating current domain owners to the new system. Build prototypes. Start putting those prototypes into web browsers behind feature flags.

Show them what the internet could look like if it starts to fragment at the DNS level.

Show them that we're serious.

Handshake [1] migrates current stakeholders to a new decentralized root owned by the commons and works within existing protocol standards.

[1] https://www.handshake.org

NameCoin [1] is an emerging consensus-based decentralized DNS system.

Any replacement will need to facilitate existing domains, it could be implemented as an add-on to existing resolvers like bind or dnsmasq.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Namecoin

One problem at a time.

I don't think it's a good idea to toss in an ambitious redesign of the internet name system when it's not even clear that we can get everybody to agree to just stare down ICANN.

ENS is managed by a non-profit, and they seem fairly competent: https://medium.com/the-ethereum-name-service/who-should-own-...

> run by competent, principled people.

That is a root cause of a lot of problem. Whatever org you build eventually honest competent people will be replaced by callous assholes.

I think we can accomplish a lot by demonstrating that we're serious about routing around bad behavior. If people start seriously talking about migrating away from today's ICANN, I suspect that one of two things are likely to happen:

1. ICANN might see this as an existential threat, realize that they can't act with impunity, and will start to change their behavior. I am pretty pessimistic about ICANN's current leadership, and think this is less likely to happen.

2. The powers that be will start to see what a disaster this would be, and will find a way to replace the current ICANN leadership. I think this is more likely to happen.

Either way, the result is a better outcome for everyone, at least for a while. But that's how governance works -- leadership tries to get away with whatever they can, and people need to get angry enough to threaten their ability to continue down that path. This process doesn't end.

Either that, or they'll try to get Congress to pass laws that force everyone to use ICANN, in the name of security or some other.

If Google, Mozilla, Apple and Microsoft decided to split the root using browsers, I think the US government would be happier having them under their control. Why do they need to play ICANN's game if US companies control the new DNS.

Fuck ICANN, why would US government want to continue to support a corrupt international organization trying to avoid US government oversight?

A decentralized solution would always be best IMO instead of relying on one sole organization

I agree - and good long term solutions that have been tried haven't held up well - you just need to occasionally shake the house and get all the corruption out.

> Google

They are trying to kill URL, with AMP and hiding parts of address in Chrome bar. The perfect google customer never types any URL and uses search engine instead.

I agree with this. The power really lies with Browser holders. The browser is the most used app in the world.

If browser folks + name registry folks like namecheap, godaddy, cloudflare etc got together to another .com resolution method and gave ICANN and Verizon a middle finger, this could really work.

Right now, as is, ICANN is a corrupt and profit at any cost motivated org. This will most surely not turn out well for the internet.

VeriSign

Perhaps ICANN will accelerate the solution to this self-correcting problem. ;-)

The problem with alternate roots is they usually abandon traditional domains. A solution to this problem must include some way to bring the existing .COM, .ORG and .NET databases into the new root or else existing domain owners will look at the cost of migrating the brand they've spent years building and instead decide to just pay the ICANN tax.

By my limited understanding, Handshake does exactly this, with a Handshake-equivalent domain for any of the top ~100k .com holders for free.

The issue is that DNS registrations should cost money to dis-incentivize excessive parking. And the money it should cost vastly exceeds operating costs. It's not clear what you should do with that money - someone is bound to be unhappy.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com