It's also one of the subjects in The Dictator's Handbook,
an excellent layman's read on political economics by Bruce Bueno de Mesquita and Alastair Smith.
For ENS you can resolve names by just installing Metamask. The wallet part of Metamask is not easy to use, but if you just want to brows ENS domains I don't think it can get lower friction than that.
Why a browser add-on? That's a really bizarre way to do that and it only fixes interactive web browsing. There is a lot more to networking than web browsers!
OpenNIC looks like the easiest replacement, they mention some other TLDs they're peered with on their front page such as emerDNS which is decentralized.
That doesn't work for anyone who wants their site accessible to the public though, since it won't resolve. Maybe once a few ISPs switch and Google, OpenDNS etc. change their resolvers it'll be a possibility.
OpenNIC is no different than ICANN aside from being a failure. It just appears to be better since it uses a talk track that's attractive, but structurally, it's probably even worse than ICANN.
Handshake.org is another contender that's launching soon. I wrote a blog post exploring some of the security benefits of Handshake[1] which got a lot of discussion on HN[2].
You could replace them with a centralized solution even. All you need is general agreement to use new root name servers. The new system could even fallback to the old one, providing a transition period.
Could probably be done by Microsoft, Apple & Google getting together and deciding how to split the billions and how much they toss the Linux Foundation & Firefox to come along for the ride. It doesn't have to be a great deal, just a better one than ICANN and its landlords provide.
This is what I did, instead of buying new domains for my every new personal project, i just bought domain bydav.in; & now use foo.bydav.in, this.bydav.in bar.bydav.in etc.
I’m defiantly going to drop down. Right now I have a personal domain, my parents domain and a few other. High schooler me didn’t realize what I was signing myself up for when I started using a personal domain.
You can also use alternative root zone projects like Handshake.org. Most people wouldn't be able to resolve it by default but if it's just for personal use it's trivial to set up a resolver for friends and family.
In 2014 the Obama Admin decided to cede control of ICANN.
ICANN is run like a classic Italian mafia org, with corruption at every level and zero accountability.
This year the Trump Admin rubber stamped a price increase on .com because.... reasons?
The price of domains should trend down. not up. This is a classic case of regulation being abused by those in power to give each other a bonus.
Running a global address book has gotten cheaper and easier with automation and yet we're allowing these orgs to just increase prices willynilly instead of trying to make internet hosting more accessible.
Domains are more like real estate. They can become almost arbitrarily expensive on the global market because they represent a somewhat exhaustible resource of phrases that people can actually remember.
As with any system where you have private resource owners controlling a basic need you should expect corruption and abuse of the customer base. From Water Barons to Landlords to Cable/Broadband companies the pattern repeats itself time and time again. This is why we have regulated industries.
But the governing org shouldn't be the one extracting that value. their job is govern and to some extent regulate. anything else is outside their domain.
If not the governing org then who? It's not in the public interest to facilitate or encourage rent seeking. To the extent that price differences are inevitable in a market based system (where we assume the party most worthy of a domain is the one willing to put the most money into acquiring it), it only makes sense that the money be used for the public good.
Value and Cost are very different things. ICANN is a governing organization, and once they're allowed to extract funds greater than what it costs them to operate, just means they're abusing their power.
Their value doesn't, so why should renewals go down?* It's not like registration is related to anything like cost of operation...
*: I'm not in favour of this, but living in a capitalist market, I'm surprised things haven't gotten much worse, e.g. a sliding scale cost for domains, so Amazon would have to pay $50,000,000/year for its domain, for example.
I was actually thinking about this the other day. Domains are too easy to get, and too cheap to hold on to. I like being able to go to Namecheap and buy a domain name for under $10... what I don't like is the hours or days I spend trying to find a domain name that isn't already taken and parked. And even if you paid $3k for that parked domain, it might now have years of history with search engines as a parked domain that you have to fight against.
If ICANN really wants more money, they'd increase the renewal fee for parked domains every year until it's actually put into use.
Yeah, people always use domains for non-website purposes, like email etc with nothing coming up if browsed. Also, with no dns on main except cnames, which can not be easily found as easily mx or txt records can be seen on a gived direct domain.
That’s not really a parked domain then is it? You know when you’ve hit a parked domain when it loads a page covered in ads that says “buy this domain for $30,000” at the top.
For the uninitiated, the World Trade Organization is run by its member governments. Unlike FIFA, IOC, and ICANN, it does not sell a product to consumers. It facilitates the production of laws and agreements between member states. If you buy Bueno de Mesquita's selectorate theory, the WTO has a very small set of residents, which is identical to the selectorate and the winning coalition. The FIFA, IOC, and ICANN have a very large set of residents, a very small selectorate, and a very secure winning coalition, which is a recipe for corruption.
What’s your take on something like the ITU? My first reaction would be that because there’s a lot more riding on it, it’d be susceptible to intractable politics... but maybe I’m overthinking it.
ITU is under the United Nations, so it's more like the WTO.
I feel like that's the way ICANN should have gone, and it is probably worth it to just buy out the organization and put it under the UN. Either that or some version of decentralized DNS is going to start looking really attractive and ICANN will become the equivalent of a failed state.
> I think something like this should have remained within government. Deregulation here wasn’t necessary.
The legal doctrine that established a nexus in the US simply because ICANN was controlled by the US government had long-term geopolitical repercussions. In the lead up, the FBI seized the domains belonging to sites that otherwise had no ties to the US under this doctrine. I suspect the long-term fear was that other countries would deploy their own root name server, which would not in the American national interest.
Given the trend I think this is only the beginning. We'll likely see increasing rent seeking behavior from ICANN administration since their power is effectively unchecked.
I can’t see how this is rent seeking. .com domains are a finite and scarce resource, they should be increasing in price over time. The registration costs are also a tiny fraction of what any desirable domain name would sell for on the secondary market. I don’t think you can describe selling something for well below the equilibrium price as rent seeking.
I’m also not sure it’s even a bad thing to have registration costs increasing. DNS is a highly dysfunctional system, especially for the popular TLDs. If you want an alternative system to take its place, then rising registration costs will only increase the demand for that.
Since you're getting downvoted for an honest question, I'll explain: you're confusing the cost of owning a domain with the cost of registering a domain. ICANN and Verisign don't own nor sell domain names, they just perform administrative functions relating to owning and selling them. The gist of this article is that Verisign gave ICANN a kickback to get the right to charge more money without adding more value, which is pretty much what "rent-seeking" means.
The ICANN ITSELF got 20m. How many senior members will, in totally unrelated transactions, suddenly find they can buy yachts or pay off mortgages they previously couldn't in the next 12 months?
This is corruption in it's purest form, but I feel like there might be a silver lining here. If they increase prices on domains the scummy domain name squatters will get burned and have to dump a good chunk of their inventory when renewal comes up. They're basically taking the margin that the scalpers were exploiting.
Legitimate players lose out as well. But you're correct that this hurts the squatters more, as they're the ones subject to linear multiple cost increases.
What TLDs should be looked at that are in the nearly $10~ or less range and are not likely to rate hike? I hate the idea of investing $10/year in a personal use domain then getting a surprise $50 bill X years later.
I never understood the fascination with domain names anyway.
I actually rather liked just memorizing IP's. I thought it had a nice parity with phone numbers, which we were all kind of used to anyway.
The whole "buy a name" thing struck me as little more than a land grab for speculators anyway. You already have a unique identifier to the overall network... Just use it!
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[ 3.1 ms ] story [ 174 ms ] threadhttps://www.amazon.com/Dictators-Handbook-Behavior-Almost-Po...
If you want the hardcore game theory version, check out The Logic of Political Survival by the same authors: https://projects.iq.harvard.edu/gov2126/files/bueno_mesquita...
What other options are there that you're aware of?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alternative_DNS_root
That doesn't work for anyone who wants their site accessible to the public though, since it won't resolve. Maybe once a few ISPs switch and Google, OpenDNS etc. change their resolvers it'll be a possibility.
[1] https://www.namebase.io/blog/meet-handshake-decentralizing-d... [2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20995969
Could probably be done by Microsoft, Apple & Google getting together and deciding how to split the billions and how much they toss the Linux Foundation & Firefox to come along for the ride. It doesn't have to be a great deal, just a better one than ICANN and its landlords provide.
What a scam.
We're living in an era of walled gardens, where your Twitter and Instagram handle matter more than a domain name.
The ICANN acting in a hostile manner is only going to push them closer to irrelevance.
In 2014 the Obama Admin decided to cede control of ICANN.
ICANN is run like a classic Italian mafia org, with corruption at every level and zero accountability.
This year the Trump Admin rubber stamped a price increase on .com because.... reasons?
The price of domains should trend down. not up. This is a classic case of regulation being abused by those in power to give each other a bonus.
Running a global address book has gotten cheaper and easier with automation and yet we're allowing these orgs to just increase prices willynilly instead of trying to make internet hosting more accessible.
Why? The value of a dollar goes down over time, but the value of a domain does not.
The value of high-demand domain names should increase on the secondary markets. But, the price of unregistered names should be decreasing.
Domains are more like real estate. They can become almost arbitrarily expensive on the global market because they represent a somewhat exhaustible resource of phrases that people can actually remember.
As with any system where you have private resource owners controlling a basic need you should expect corruption and abuse of the customer base. From Water Barons to Landlords to Cable/Broadband companies the pattern repeats itself time and time again. This is why we have regulated industries.
Value and Cost are very different things. ICANN is a governing organization, and once they're allowed to extract funds greater than what it costs them to operate, just means they're abusing their power.
Their value doesn't, so why should renewals go down?* It's not like registration is related to anything like cost of operation...
*: I'm not in favour of this, but living in a capitalist market, I'm surprised things haven't gotten much worse, e.g. a sliding scale cost for domains, so Amazon would have to pay $50,000,000/year for its domain, for example.
It would seem like it should.
If ICANN really wants more money, they'd increase the renewal fee for parked domains every year until it's actually put into use.
and how do you differentiate a parked domain from a non-parked domain?
at which point the government suddenly feels an urgent need to step in.
It’s small but has outsized impact on how the internet works.
That said maybe devolution was eventually inevitable.
I agree, but even that is far from ideal because which government should control it?
I feel like that's the way ICANN should have gone, and it is probably worth it to just buy out the organization and put it under the UN. Either that or some version of decentralized DNS is going to start looking really attractive and ICANN will become the equivalent of a failed state.
The Obama admin's intent was to increase faith in ICANN by pulling it away from strictly American interests.
That does not appeared to have worked out.
The legal doctrine that established a nexus in the US simply because ICANN was controlled by the US government had long-term geopolitical repercussions. In the lead up, the FBI seized the domains belonging to sites that otherwise had no ties to the US under this doctrine. I suspect the long-term fear was that other countries would deploy their own root name server, which would not in the American national interest.
Was it ICANN that sued/was sued by one of its own _board members_ to not have to show them their finances?
> This is a classic case of regulation being abused by those in power to give each other a bonus.
He dropped regulation and oversight, and the result is we now suffer because of regulation?
I’m also not sure it’s even a bad thing to have registration costs increasing. DNS is a highly dysfunctional system, especially for the popular TLDs. If you want an alternative system to take its place, then rising registration costs will only increase the demand for that.
That's rent seeking. They provide no value, they simply try to corner the market and jack up the prices.
See the theft of dot org or the opening of TLDs.
I actually rather liked just memorizing IP's. I thought it had a nice parity with phone numbers, which we were all kind of used to anyway.
The whole "buy a name" thing struck me as little more than a land grab for speculators anyway. You already have a unique identifier to the overall network... Just use it!