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Comment by fredley | Hacker News Reader

This has made me realise I have no idea what the answer to these questions is: who did they buy it from? Where does that money go? Who mines/forges/lays new tlds?

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ICANN.

Who can basically make new TLDs whenever, can't they? At no real cost to themselves. By what authority to they derive that privilege, why are they allowed to make such huge sums without doing anything useful for the money?

The US government. Someone else will be able to explain. I just read a bunch about it and am still extremely confused.

I'll just leave this quote:

> The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) is the private sector, non-profit corporation

Because USA.

Because ICANN is responsible for overseeing the DNS root servers, and those roots are always used by ISPs as a matter of convention.

If you made your own DNS root and got folks to adopt it, you could make your own TLDs as well. Folks have tried in the past, none have really caught on (outside of a few specialized services, like .onion for Tor).

There's a pretty interesting book about the formation of ICANN called Ruling The Root if anyone wants to read about it further.

Amazon link:

http://smile.amazon.com/Ruling-Root-Internet-Governance-Cybe...

To be fair, someone has to be responsible for deciding which TLD's should exist. Since the modern internet as we know it came from the ARPANet, the US government (specifically the USDoC) formed the ICANN to privatize the management of the public DNS system (they also sit over the IANA by contract from the US government at this time) - everyone else just fell in line and went with it.

> someone has to be responsible for deciding which TLD's should exist

Why? Why can't we have as many custom TLD's as we want? Or why can't my blog just end with .helloworld if I decide to do so?

someone needs to manage a tld just like and for the same reasons someone needs to manage a domain...

If you really want to stick it to "the man", you should just use the raw IP address for your blog and forgo the domain name! ;)

Ah, but your provider got those IPs from one of the regional registries* (ARIN, RIPE NCC, etc.), who got them from the IANA, which is a division of...ICANN!

(* Unless it's a legacy IPv4 allocation that predates the RIR system.)

You can. But if you want it to be resolvable by everyone in the world, it needs to be added to the root servers, which are controlled by US DoC/ICANN.

> Why? Why can't we have as many custom TLD's as we want? Or why can't my blog just end with .helloworld if I decide to do so?

You can do whatever you want, but the internet runs on consensus and if consensus devolves into everyone doing whatever they want then DNS doesn't add anything beyond just using raw IP addresses.

my.stupid.web.s.i.t.e

Is ridiculous and an example of something I think should be avoided, but even it has added value beyond a raw IP address

They gave it to themselves.

DNS admins who use the standard root.hints -> owners of those IP blocks -> administrators of those servers.

It's essentially the same attention-consensus-economy game that web startups do, but earlier, more primitive, and deeper.

They're now arbitraging the trust which got them to this point.

Nobody tell him about banks and fiat currency. Let this one sink in first.

"Who can..." ICANN. Yes it can be whenever they want. No one ever stops them. They added several in 2001. Now they've opened the floodgates.

"At no real cost..." True. Except the cost of running one of the 13 server addresses. And IMO it could be a dog and no one would notice. I think the A server (198.41.0.4) is really all anyone needs. The cost of a new TLD to ICANN is the cost of editing a text file.

"By what authority..." None.

", why are they allowed..." A question I have been asking for over 20 years. Answer: Because we let them?

You can say no to ICANN. Run your own root on 127.x.x.x. You can edit the root.zone to be just as you want it. Want to delete a silly TLD (e.g., .loans)? Edit a text file. Want to add your own new TLD? Edit a text file. The cost? Editing a text file.

I recall a former Board member of ICANN admitting he himself ran his own root for many years.

ICANN's ability to make millions in profit from TLD's relies on an interesting prerequisite. All DNS admins have to use a root.hints file that points to the (13) addresses serving ICANN's root.zone. Often they have no idea this root.hints file even exists, let alone have the guts to edit it. The root server addresses to use are chosen by the authors of the DNS software, e.g., the software automatically downloads root.hints from ICANN to bootstrap itself.

If admins or users choose to use a different list of root server addresses (e.g., 127.x.x.x, 10.x.x.x., etc.), all bets are off.

So how do you stop ICANN from making millions posing as a pseudo licensing authority for registries? One way is to stop using ICANN's root.hints and use a different root.zone that you control. If enough people do this then one day ICANN has no relevance.

Right. Not gonna happen. I'm probably one of only a small number of users who will ever run their own root.

Namecoin tries to break that monopole by using a p2p database with a blockchain like bitcoin.

So far without any success :)

That is because it still relies on paying for the domain.

The Tor network can "register" and address ( call it a pointer, because it's basically a hash ) for .onion. That means if you run the the tor service, you have a pointer, and this is probably a good solution.

So if we'd all had a distributed global "dns"-like network, where each and every system gets a unique id this would partially be solved, for free, but the requirement for master nodes (like tracker servers for torrents ) would probably still be present.

The problem with this approach is that obviously you can't make a choice for xyz.mydomain, because there will be at least someone else who wants xyz.mydomain, and in this case, who and how would decide which of you can have it? Right now this decision maker is money, which of course is an issue, but at least a solution.

So: does anyone have a distributed, fair solution, that is able to solve disputes and act as a replacement for dns? So far I'm not aware of any.

Well, for new applicants they have to go through the Swedish Internet Foundation testing.

https://www.iis.se/vad-vi-gor/pdt/#PDT_eng

Disclaimer: I work for the Internet foundation in Sweden.

Now that they opened the floodgates I kind of think this is the end of it, though? The number of decent candidates for a new site has skyrocketed (to the point of there being too many even to guard against from domain squatters for many companies), and thus value of new TLD's plummeting?

The problem is that DNS-as-a-global-naming-service is only useful because more-or-less everyone agrees that for a given domain, it'll resolve to the same place. Therefore, to change away from ICANN's authority, you have to get every user of DNS to agree to do so.

Having worked for a registry ICANS technical requirement are a lot more than just throwing up a single AWS instance.

For .coop we had to have fully redundant servers (ie < 99.9999 uptime) on 4 continents

No, actually. The sum for the TLD. is actually split between the other bidders for that gTLD.

So if you had applied to bid, and lost out on .blog, you would have gotten an equal share of the money that Automattic paid to be the owner of the TLD.

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