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by mindslight 1631 days ago
ICANN has clearly strayed from its charter of nonprofit root trustee, and is acting like any other for profit entity and arbitraging away their assets. I'd love to see a root-restandardization effort that aims to take anything that isn't (com/net/org, the country code tlds, and whatever other traditional ones I'm forgetting) and sticks it under a new .icann or whatever. So ICANN can "sell .google", but most everyone would end up referring to it as ".google.icann". The sooner this is done the better, to make it clear that attempting to use the root pollution will end up being a painful experience.

Heck, let Big Tech take .google/.apple/.amazon/.comcast etc if that's what it takes to get this done. Point being to keep the root pollution to a finite amount rather than the ongoing sell off of any name imaginable.
1 comments
duskwuff 1631 days ago
And invalidate every URL and hostname in existence? That's an absolute nonstarter of an idea.
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mindslight 1631 days ago
If you think through the implications of my proposal you'll see that it is only invalidating hostnames in these ICANN-giveaway new "TLDs". Traditional domains would remain unchanged. Trustees of traditional TLDs would still continue their corruption (as was narrowly avoided for .org a few months ago), but that's probably inevitable. Meanwhile we'd preserve the root namespace for the adoption of better technologies (eg .onion).

And honestly we need better mechanics for machine-intended references regardless. It's ridiculous that you resolve and load a webpage, only for that webpage to require you to resolve a bunch more human readable (ie non-decentralized) names for loading subresources. For example, going to a bookmarked page shouldn't result in any DNS queries for human readable names.

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duskwuff 1631 days ago
> If you think through the implications of my proposal you'll see that it is only invalidating hostnames in these ICANN-giveaway new "TLDs". Traditional domains would remain unchanged.

And why should that distinction be made? "New gTLDs" have been active since 2013. That's nearly 10 years of usage you're still arguing should be invalidated.

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mindslight 1631 days ago
Because it was clear at the time the trustee had gone crazy, and combined with being ugly as hell, they never really got used for anything serious. Rather why should ICANN be able to convert a public resource that had been held in trust, and we just have to accept it?

To be clear I'm not picking on things like .biz etc. Even though those were obvious cash grabs, they're at least widely applicable and thus widely adopted. But things like .christmastrees .business .companyname .morebiglongwords etc. Over "nearly 10 years of usage" I can still count on my fingers the number of times I've seen things like this used.

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