[crankylinuxuser]

Having a crazy thought here...

So we have things like Tor, which makes a PKI based .onion TLD. What's stopping Us (the people) from making our own TLDs?

It really just is a massive amount of groupthink, inertia, and acceptance of who dns is... right?

And with IP6 seems like it'd be a wild west on all sorts of TLDs.. But we have these monolithic orgs holding us all back. Hell, I know it's orthogonal to TLDs, but we even had the ANPR ip space sold partially to Amazon ( https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20475855 ). Bluntly stated, these orgs that manage underlying infra aren't trustworthy. And that goes without stating ICANN and all those woes.

[andrew2984]

Lots of people have tried to create these "alternative roots" to the traditional DNS. It's a chicken and egg problem. In order for website owners to choose these alt domains, they need every browser, email system and software to support them. In order for the browser makers et al to support them, they need millions of people to be using them.

[simlevesque]

Check out OpenNIC: https://www.opennic.org/

[judge2020]

I posted this elsewhere a while ago but it's relevant to opennic, let me know if something is out-of-date or wrong:

The choice to support DNS roots like .oz, .ku, .te, .ti, and .uu is not standards-compliant. Say suddenly a new nation comes into the world and ISO assigns them one of these abbreviations, or one of these “emerging countries” they have TLDs for gets assigned a different cctld, what does opennic do? They made the choice to pre-register a bunch of domains under these reserved 2-letter country codes, so now they either have to

A. stop being able to say “we directly support all ICANN-assigned tlds” and keep resolving the existing domains

or

B. say to the existing domain owners of [their artificial] tld “sorry to be you” as their domain names they thought they owned now become registered to other entities.

[SpicyLemonZest]

The implicit goal of a project like OpenNIC is to eventually get a seat at the standards compliance table, where they'll be able to convince decisionmakers not to make those assignments in the first place.

For now they do (B). They renamed their .free domain to .libre after ICANN registered .free.

[echelon]

Why don't they purchase gTLDs?

[SpicyLemonZest]

They're ideologically opposed to ICANN's authority over gTLD registration, so even if they could afford to I don't think they'd want to.

[judge2020]

I imagine the cost is too much for them or for any business to sponsor them unless it's by a FAANG-level company. $125k is the cost for gTLDs, and 2-letter TLDs can't be bought.

[SpicyLemonZest]

Right, it's mostly based on inertia and acceptance. There are 6 figure startup costs to making a new TLD - enough to prevent people from polluting the namespace on a whim, but not out of range for a large coordinated effort.