| Technical merits aside... Why was this done as an alternate root project rather than an alternate tld? I get it makes the project more useful (ability to register .johnsmith rather than johnsmith.bit), but it's going to severely increase complications when interoperating with the ICANN dns root. what happens if you register .foobar on handshake, and then a few years later, ICANN delegates .foorbar? If you let the ICANN registration take precedence, all the .foobar domain owners on handshake side will lose their registrations. The threat of that will keep most people from using tlds registered on handshake. Why buy a domain on .foobar (handshake root) rather than .foobaz (ICANN root)? It might cost a few bucks more, but honestly I'd be willing to pay a few dollars/year more knowing my domain is secure. Of course, it's possible that operator of the ICANN tld would give an opportunity for the domain owners on the handshake side to migrate over, but then they'd miss out on all the revenue on those premium domains. why allow the old owners of pizza.foobar keep their domain when you can resell it for $$$? The project mentions that they have pre-reserved certain TLDs, but all that does is delay the inevitable. The first conflicts are going to be with yet-to-be-delegated gTLDs, since they're not in the current root (obviously), and they're not in the alexa 100k (while they're some sites with generic words as domains, most of them are squatted, which means they're probably not in the alexa 100k). The only hope of this project surviving is if they gain critical mass and overtake ICANN as the most popular root. The network effect is insane with DNS (maybe even higher than with social networks), so unless there's a good reason for everyone to use this, I think this project will stay very niche. |
A particular TLD (.bit) would clash with ICANN the same, unless someone would keep shelling $185k/y for keeping it up. This does not look very realistic. Registering a TLD is the only official way to interact with ICANN in this area, and I don't see ICANN making any concessions to an outright competitor. Even if registered, such a domain would make little sense: now every Handshake user would depend on ICANN again, hoping it will not hand the TLD to some other registrar (e.g. due to a failure to pay the yearly $185k). This sort of defeats one of the purposes of the project.
Not having a single traditional TLD at the end does have upsides. Any name with a long TLD immediately stands out as a Handshake name. Any reasonable person would register a domain very unlikely to clash with ICANN's TLDs. The lack of need to belong to a handful of TLDs allows to e.g. use dashes instead of dots, lowering the chance of a conflict: not joe.crypto.exchange but joe-crypto-exchange. (Of course people who want to squat short common words likely to be made TLDs by ICANN may do it at their own peril.)
Explicitly being at odds with ICANN forces the project to handle this outright, add a conflict-resolution policy applied at the client side: on a conflict, prefer which source at which domain? How to indicate a conflict anyway? There are no one-size-fits-all solutions here, but reasonable solutions should exist.
In general, I think the technical merits outweigh the risk of name clashes significantly for almost any reasonable user. (Unreasonable users will always exist; they should not be paid too much attention.)