[tptacek]

Who is "you"? The people we're afraid of manipulating .COM control the DNS. Google can't "map .com to another key". Their option would be to leave .COM; that is the gun DNSSEC would give to the USG to hold against Google's head.

[wav-part]

You is firefox/chrome/etc. Yes you can. The ownership of .com is not as exclusive/protected as .xxx or xxx.com. Thus the firefox/chrome/etc can map it to anyone they feel. Considering so many high value .com subnames, .com can be transferred to neutral party or even dnsroot. USG do not own ".com" string. No one does. Just like ".".

[tptacek]

Your claim here is that a browser vendor could somehow fork the DNS and use its own .COM? Explain how that could possibly work.

[wav-part]

Anyone can fork DNS. Its just a (name, key) map. As long as its done with enough consensus, it can be done. Mismanagement of .com is serious enough to demand that kind of change.

Lets say .com gets mismanaged. Community is infurious. firefox/chrome/etc demands that . remap .com to new more trustable entity. If . does not. firefox/chrome/etc then remap . to new more trustable entity, because .com must be as trustable as ., because .com is that important. New . give back ownership of all tlds to their previous owners. Except for .com. .com goes to the more trustable entity as intended. New .com then does again similar import of all good xxx.com.

In this whole incident, no one loses the ownership of their names except for .com and possibly . .

Now no gov can touch *.com. Though its different for cctld. Those are owned by their respective govs. Same goes for gtld. But no one gets to mess with . .com .org .net.

[akerl_]

It sounds like what you’re proposing is for browser vendors to, in unison, overthrow IANA and the related organizations and stage a coup where they start running their own DNS root authority. And then claiming that this would happen without impact to end users / owners-of-individual-domains.

[wav-part]

Browser vendors (specifically all DNS users) have the option. They can do it, if IANA fails at the job of being a dnsroot. Disruption is inversely proportional to consensus. If everyone do it, there is no disruption. Some disruption is unavoidable. Its fair price to pay for stable and solid global naming system.

Ultimately its about deciding who gets to own "x.y.z" string brand globally/contextlessly. World obviously need a single naming system. Either that or expect to have multiple owners to "google.com".

My suggestions are required otherwise why would someone build a global brand if ownership is not safe or guarnteed enough. Future is way more chaotic. Without crypto, a global naming system is not going to survive.

[tptacek]

OK. I don't think we have to debate this any more. We can just leave it here: you think DNSSEC is a workable solution to our problems as long as the browsers can, if they ever need to, create their own alternate DNS for the web.