I've never understood why some random company is allowed to arbitrate the domain registration and make $$$ out of it. Feels like it's kinda not in the spirit of the internet.
It is a complete state-sponsored racket. There's no way around it.
You pay an upfront fee to ICANN and probably some kind of recurring tax and you get to create a TLD. You then sell this TLD for higher prices than ICANN and run a very simple service that processes the transactions.
You then take anything lower than a 5 or 6 letter domain that is a word in the english language and define it as a "premium" domain and charge obscene prices for those domains. The fee you charge for the domain based on this system is recurring. So instead of buying milk.com for $10k and selling it for $12k you already own milk.blog by default and if someone wants to register it you charge $500 a year.
NOT TO MENTION this whole system is like a slap in the face to a certain kind of "domainers." People who buy domains based on their perceived value, park them, and then try and resell them for more money. There are many millions of dollars wrapped up in this other, also stupid racket. These companies got so bold as to get their domains "valued" and then bet on the value of their company based on their holdings like some type of stock filled with mortgages. This new system is like cutting directly into that strategy but I guess ICANN gets some of the money this way.
I have a last name that's extremely uncommon. MyLastName.com was available for many, many years. I thought about buying it a few times in the last 20 or so years but I don't have any use for it so I didn't. Two years ago it was bought by a domain squatter who was probably iterating through the white pages. Now that I can't have it I want it (I guess human nature) but they are asking like $2k for it. It seems somehow "unfair" that "my" last name is being "held hostage" by some faceless company that's just trying to make a quick buck.
Almost as expensive (UDRP claims start around $1500), and more importantly, it'll fail. WIPO isn't that dumb -- they can look up the registration date of your trademark, check WHOIS, and determine that the domain was registered before your trademark existed.
> and determine that the domain was registered before your trademark existed
It's a shame they don't determine that the domain was squatted before your trademark existed. But it seems in their interest to give the benefit of the doubt to the one buying many, many domains yearly.
Exactly. And definitely not guaranteed to work. Just pay a visit to nissan.com and read about the scumbag efforts of the car company to swipe that domain from some random dude who's owned it -- and isn't a squatter! -- for years and years.
Spare a thought for us Cooks of the world. Four letters, a noun and a verb...
After the gTLD explosion I thought I could finally snare a decent one but they all went into the $1000+ category immediately, excepting niches like cook.republican, cook.accountant etc.
Luckily some did eventually come down, I managed to get cook.run for a more reasonable $50/year
So the organization that provides an essential service to the internet gets decent funding and a bunch of squatters (sorry, "domainers") get shot down.
DNS is a rotten system. From censorship, to ddos attacks, to squatting, to privacy issues with whois, to messed up financial incentives. It's a shame that DNS is a critical part of the internet infrastructure. We should work on getting rid of it.
I guess it's two distinct issues to me; the tech stack that is hobbling along, and the people that control access to it (ICANN, gTLD registries et al I guess).
The latter is the really corrupt, broken thing here, and we should be able to swap that out.
Namecoin is probably the largest, and provides .bit. IPFS has IPNS, but that is just subdirectories of a user hash, there is no pretty naming there.
There is also tech like what is behind .onion, where you can generate names until you get one you like, where you can devote more resources to getting prettier names at the cost of electricity and hardware to do so.
"Unlike DNS, GNS does not rely on central root zones or authorities. Instead any user administers his own root and can can create arbitrary name value mappings. Furthermore users can delegate resolution to other users' zones just like DNS NS records do. Zones are uniquely identified via public keys and resource records are signed using the corresponding public key. Delegation to another user's zone is done using special PKEY records and petnames. A petname is a name that can be freely chosen by the user. This results in non-unique name-value mappings as www.bob.gnu to one user might be www.friend.gnu for someone else."
Yes, this is an application where the blockchain wouldn't necessarily be stupid.
I don't see it as necessary, to be honest, and given the frequency with which people lose access to their wallets/have them stolen, I'm not entirely sure the bulk of domain owners would want bearer instruments to be the sole way to manage (or lose) their domain.
Anyone can run their own DNS root, but good luck getting people to use it. And ICANN has a history of deliberately colliding with TLDs used by competing services.
Browser vendors and OS makers should do an end run around ISPs and ICANN. Just agree between themselves ( what are they like 10? tops) and fork the current registries. Then issue domains themselves.
What are the plebs gonna do? Go the the non existent alternative?
Google already controls chunks of every platform involved, some of them are very large, (network, domain registry, OS, browser, search engine, web hosting/content delivery) and eats away the importance of domains bite by bite. Non-tech people do not type in domains anymore, they search for them. URLs are getting hidden away further and further.
The DNS resolver is configurable, not hard coded. Forcing a switch would require OS vendors to ignore the resolver issued via DHCP, which would not work on many corporate networks that block outbound DNS not via their resolver.
Yes I think any new system would have to see the old one grandfathered (give the current incumbents time to find something useful to do instead of jetting off to conferences all year).
Browsers/OS would be reasonably easy in most circumstances, but there are embedded devices, load-balancing configurations, other esoteric uses for DNS (text records, mail etc) that'd have to be considered as well.
An attack surface is ISPs and Governments strongarming them to use their own DNS roots which can then be plugged into the "new" root servers conforming with the theoretical browser vendor, os vendor alliance.
It really isn't that hard (source: designed and ran the development team that built the initial .name platform, before we outsourced it to Verisign; Verisign now owns it outright), and you can contract any number of operators to do it for you.
There certainly is the issue that most of these TLDs aren't very interesting to most people, though. With low demand, I certainly understand why they want to be able to milk the few names that people find attractive.
You pay an upfront fee to ICANN and probably some kind of recurring tax and you get to create a TLD. You then sell this TLD for higher prices than ICANN and run a very simple service that processes the transactions.
You then take anything lower than a 5 or 6 letter domain that is a word in the english language and define it as a "premium" domain and charge obscene prices for those domains. The fee you charge for the domain based on this system is recurring. So instead of buying milk.com for $10k and selling it for $12k you already own milk.blog by default and if someone wants to register it you charge $500 a year.
NOT TO MENTION this whole system is like a slap in the face to a certain kind of "domainers." People who buy domains based on their perceived value, park them, and then try and resell them for more money. There are many millions of dollars wrapped up in this other, also stupid racket. These companies got so bold as to get their domains "valued" and then bet on the value of their company based on their holdings like some type of stock filled with mortgages. This new system is like cutting directly into that strategy but I guess ICANN gets some of the money this way.