[Joeri]

So basically ICANN itself is corrupt and must be replaced wholesale with a proper public interest steward?

Maybe people are protesting the wrong thing. The sale of .org is a symptom, the underlying cause is a bad regulatory framework for internet names.

[Accujack]

Exactly. Internet naming is a situation where artificial value is assigned to a nearly valueless resource for the purpose of collecting rent.

There's no technical reason we can't have multiple systems for translating names into addresses. There's no longer any technical reason for having neatly organized dot separated addresses based on TLDs.

Allowing the translation of any text string into an address is entirely possible with present day computing power, and a truly distributed system similar to the global routing table would work to organize different providers announcing their own name domains.

Maintaining the old DNS TLD domains is stupid and subject to manipulation by corporations and corrupt politicians.

Like this sale.

[stkdump]

I heard this argument a few times now. But are domain names not important for internet security? Https certs prove that the entity you expect communicates with you, given that you know the domain name of that entity.

[Accujack]

It's one way to do that... but the present format and management of the domain name system isn't important. You can create a security certificate for any form of text string and use it to validate the other end of the connection.

The certificates are essentially a trusted authority saying cryptographically "we have verified this is really the person you think this name is" and that can be done for any identifier. Also, this system was set up before public key encryption became common, and there are plenty of other ways to accomplish the same function with PK crypto.

[stkdump]

Ok, but how is a domain name essentially different from 'any form of text string'? There needs to be some central registry, unless you are ok with such long strings that nobody will effectively double check, that they are correct.