[EGreg]

As I have already said, with the current DNS system, that’s how it works. You have to trust that your provider won’t screw you over. It’s held together by duct tape and spit.

You know, in every OTHER technology, that’s how it was before we automated things that humans previously did. You may as well have said this about telephone switchboard operators, or tying up the line, until VoIP brought the costs to zero. “Who connects your calls? I’m quite sure paying $1 a minute was good enough for nearly all situations.” Except, when it all got automated and the providers turned into dumb hubs because open protocols eliminated the middleman. Where are these phone providers today? They provide the infrastructure only, and we route around problems. Same with blockchain.

Paying someone exorbitant amounts to “maintain your domain” because it is famous, and a hosting company to “handle spikes in traffic” etc. All that results in the need to extract rents from the ecosystem in ever-more-toxic ways, using toxic forms of capitalism:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Surveillance_capitalism

But it gets worse than that. The externalities to our society of the profit protive and private ownership of public forums are immense, including widespread depression, tribalism evho cham and national anger reaching a fever pitch. All predictable. Take a look at exactly how it works:

https://rational.app

LAWeekly published an article recently about the steps I and my company have been taking for the several years to fix it:

https://www.laweekly.com/restoring-healthy-communities/

Again, Web3 and blockchain is one possible way to do it but the keys to all the solutions are decentralization and open protocols! They remove the middlemen and oligopolies (like phone companies used to be, or the original AOL/MSN walled gardens) by making an alternative system not owned by anybody and with no single points of failure or control by a few people:

https://www.independent.co.uk/tech/internet-worldwide-web-ne...

[berkes]

You have still not answered the simple question of who, within this web3 org, controls the (.org, or even the .eth) domain.

This is also a single person. Even on ENS, whom you have to trust. By moving everything onto ENS, you've, practically, not solved the issue of who controls your domain.

Sure. It mightn't be the ICAN. Instead, now, it's Jeffrey who has the private keys on his ledger. Congrats!

[EGreg]

That's like asking "who, within Bitcoin, controls the Bitcoin network".

Each person with a wallet and private keys contains neither more nor less than what they are entitled to control. Smart contracts manage collective decision making.

You should learn about "abstract accounts", i.e. smart contracts on the blockchain being the owners of different things, and acting on behalf of multiple people. This is far more secure, there is no one private key that can leak, but rather the smart contract has business logic, that everyone knows what the rules are. It's like a constitution of a country.

If you wanted to point the DNS to another IP address, for instance, you could have a rule that requires a proposal to be made, and for people to have a chance to vote on it during a voting period, with vote weights being equal or proportional to how much of a token people hold. Votes could be delegated. I wrote about all this on CoinDesk in 2020: https://www.coindesk.com/tech/2020/03/12/in-defense-of-block...

In fact, as more things become decentralized, the need to host a website at a particular IP address will go away, too. All of these Web 2.0 things are too centralized and prone to be rugpulled and changed, and the idea that someone must pay all the hosting costs is stupid, when even in 2004 BitTorrent participants also had to "seed" the same files they were "leeching". The reliability is actually necessary to the MEMBERS of the community who use it every day (exactly who you're talking about), rather than the LEADERS.

You can host static web sites on IPFS, for instance, and use smart contracts on the blockchain for business logic. That's what happens with NFTs, for instance, but that's just a first-generation technology, like the games Space Invaders and Pong.