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by mindslight 1629 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.

1 comments

> 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.

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.