[survirtual]

I explained that in the post. Namespaces / domain names / whatever you want to call them are set by individual users. The act of setting a namespace, ie binding “search” to whatever google’s hash is for example, contributes a “vote” to make that the default address for “search”.

Traffic can also contribute towards the count, either method would eventually settle on accurately capturing the will of people, but I would have to think about the mechanism for measuring traffic in a statistically accurate / honest way with a federated system.

[ameliaquining]

The thing being described here isn't really an address system. The point of addresses is that they're supposed to be stable; I want to know that I can go to google.com and know that the thing on the other end is controlled by Google and not some other entity. This is a lot more important than being able to look up "search" and know that the thing on the other end was chosen democratically rather than auctioned off. If the thing I want is to connect to one particular entity, then under this system the only way I can do that with confidence is by getting their public key out of band, which is deeply inconvenient and the whole problem that domain names were invented to solve.

Registry operators can also hijack domain names, of course, but they have an economic incentive not to do that (except in cases like malware C&C domains that don't affect legitimate users), because their job is to ensure that the whole system of stable addresses keeps working, and failing to do that would undermine confidence in the whole thing. A public vote doesn't have that incentive alignment; anyone who bothers to explicitly configure their system in this way, is fairly likely to be someone who'd join a campaign to hijack a name for the lulz or to make a political statement, at the expense of usability for regular users.

It's true that if you have human-meaningful domain names, then some of them will be more desirable than others, and anyone who can get a good one, or who can distribute good ones to those who want them, is thereby in a position to collect a certain amount of economic rent. Which isn't ideal. But this is all a second-order consideration at best; it's a side effect of the goal of stable addresses, which is the important part.

[survirtual]

It is highly unlikely that an entity like Google would not have control of the Google namespace with the scheme I am talking about, as it is clear what google is referred to as and this mechanism would eventually “settle” on the most correct names for each entity.

But if you don’t care about the entity and are talking generic names, like “search” or “market” it allows for a novel way of applying the namespace to the “best” one in a moment, without relying on a central party like an app store to tell us.

It also introduces a self-governance, eliminates stale squatting, gives better tech a chance, and eliminates the ability for authoritarian and bureaucratic entities from controlling namespaces. Who is ICANN really accountable to? If someone makes a site that is disruptive to the “national security” of powerful governments, by being more democratic and representative but stripping away their / corporate power, do you think the current system would just allow it to live?

We need new technologies that can handle fighting against the tyranny of small, unelected boards who subtly influence all of us in seemingly innocuous ways. The way we fight against it is by architecting implicitly democratic systems, bypassing these parasitic middlemen and replacing all of them with mathematically sound code.

There are some tradeoffs. We could go back and forth through this concept and discover a new weakness in the convenience, mainly for business. One might say “well, what about addressability for emails or federated identities” and, one by one, with some thought, these things could be resolved. But the core of the solution eliminates entire classes of putrid rot in the existing mechanism.

The rot I speak of is mostly unseen by people. It stifles innovation with stagnation, where squatters and “I got here first” eliminate the possibilities. This makes those possibilities completely hidden and stifled. Entrenched forces have no reason to innovate or progress. They are rewarded merely for existing, without any forces capable of opposing them without also being entrenched, or begging another entrenched force to aid them.

I can go on and on about the topic, but coming back to “globally stable addresses,” I think that this mechanism can be likened to an iterative / numerical method which, when given time, settles on the correct answer. Once a domain has settled, it would experience stability. And perhaps, when taken in conjunction with the existing system I’d want to see this mechanism replace, we already have “stable” names that come at cost. It isn’t like that would immediately go away. Every technology I talk about is voluntary, at a fundamental level no one should be coerced, whether by force or by implicit means, to use something.