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Or from the GNU naming system: https://www.gnunet.org/gns

In this scheme, there is still a central registrar with full control over the TLD. For example to register a .com domain you would still go through verisign (and pay them). This proposal would just mean that verisign would provide a public, blockchain-verified history of their DNS zone file.

That's fundamentally different from namecoin which wants to cut the registrar (verisign, etc.) of the equation.

Seems somewhat similar to Certificate Transparency project, where issued certificates are recorded in a public (merkle tree) log.

It's more similar to Blockstack: https://blockstack.org

Well after reading this post the obvious difference is that namecoin exists and this is just a idea that the author is still trying to work out.