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Comment by windexh8er | Hacker News Reader

I've been thinking a lot about the sheer downsides of DNS overall. We need something different. Something decentralized, encrypted, something not reliant on a protocol that hasn't kept pace with security and privacy and we need something verifiable that provides accountability. As others have said TLDs have become a racket. Only the priveleged and nation states have the authority to use the system as a funnel of ridiculous revenue and rate manipulation. We don't need DNS anymore. It's become more of a lynchpin to bottleneck and advance control of the few and continues to erode our privacy as it stands today. What's next?

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Looks likes you’re wanting the decentralized web [0][1][2].

The DNS equivalent technology there is DHT(distributed hash tables) [3] which was used in torrent technology for a few years. Ever wondered about how you can find the torrent seeders without a centralized entity? The Bittorrent DHT is the underlying tech.

[0] https://ipfs.io/

[1] https://dat.foundation/

[2] https://www.scuttlebutt.nz/

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Distributed_hash_table

> Ever wondered about how you can find the torrent seeders without a centralized entity? The Bittorrent DHT is the underlying tech.

The Bittorrent DHT is not fully decentralized, it needs a list of hardcoded bootstrap nodes. https://stackoverflow.com/questions/1181301/how-does-a-dht-i...

Which can easily be changed. The bootstrap nodes don’t hold any special power.

Well, it's for ease-of-use. Anyone can make an alternative DHT with their own bootstrap nodes, but the Bittorrent main one is the biggest, therefore most programs have that one hard-coded.

Anyone can make an alternative client that uses the exactly same tech with different bootstrap nodes, and once they gain popularity, there will be people using that.

Democratic, I would say.

Yes, sort of. That's one way to get peers, but clients support other ways to peers.

So in practice you can get peers from the list of previous peers, PEX (peer exchange), or a tracker for a given torrent.

So in practice once you talk to a few bittorrent peers (of millions) you likely are talking to another DHT peer and can bootstrap. Also given that there's typically millions of peers in the DHT, even brute forcing it by search IPv4 (4 billion addresses) for a few million peers is likely to only involve a few 1000 UDP packets or so.

GNS from the GNUnet project is the most interesting alternative to DNS that I've come across, and is orthogonal to projects like IPFS and Scuttlebutt (although I don't know much about Dat). It's basically DNS with DHT and some very cool crypto.

https://gnunet.org/en/video.html

I'm not convinced we are talking about a decentralization issue.

We could achieve the same result with laws. Just make what is happening illegal, corruption is already illegal.

Furthermore, decentralization won't solve the basic economy rules of offer/demand. Even with a decentralized system, website will still be referenced by natural words ("domains"), which can be owned by only one site-owner at a time, which means there will always be people ready to spent a lot of money to acquire a domain/reference.

I'm for decentralization in general, but in the current case I fail to see how decentralization alone will make domain owning fairer

In this particular case, the problem is not that individual domains can be traded at market prices though.

The problem is that organisations have to rent their domains from a central authority that can hike the rent for an entire TLD to some fantasy price.

So the hierarchical structure of DNS is clearly what creates an opportunity for corruption and extortion.

And let's not forget that DNS is ultimately a global issue, which means that the rule of law cannot be taken for granted.

Laws have to be part of the solution. But it's easier to legislate effectively if the underlying structure doesn't invite corruption, authoritarian abuse and market dysfunction in the first place.

> And let's not forget that DNS is ultimately a global issue, which means that the rule of law cannot be taken for granted.

I think this strongly points towards ccTLDs being the best solution. It is very difficult to get all the different countries to agree on common rules/governance for the legacy TLDs, but if everyone gets their own independent corner then that should be easier to get agreements on.

Dividing the control by country also conveniently avoids any single one being able to cause as much damage as ICANN now is.

I think ccTLDs don't work so well in a globalised world. Many internet services are not country specific, and ccTLDs sort of put you in the local business category.

> Many internet services are not country specific

The companies and/or owners of those services do operate under a certain legal aegis, though. It’s not like they are stateless.

I just happened to read the text on a food product; it had text in three languages, and the www.* domains listed in the three texts were in the ccTLD for each country. No .com was mentioned anywhere.

Domain names should never change and be easy to remember whereas legal ties to countries are often complex (i.e not 1 to 1) and subject to change.

Should I really have to remember going to apple.ie because that's where the Apple shop happens to be legally based at the moment? Or should it be apple.eu because consumer protection is an EU matter? Or apple.us because that's where Apple's headquarter is located?

And when a company gets sold to a different country, should all their URLs have to change?

Multinational companies should be the exception, not the rule. “Designed by Apple in California”; will Apple ever stop being a U.S. company? Why would “apple.us” not be appropriate?

A company is an entirely legal construction, and, as such, is entirely bound to the laws of a certain country.

It is amusing that you believe government would stop corruption.

History proves that to be false

Further "just make it illegal" under which nations laws? That was the problem ICANN was suppose to solve, no one wanted the internet to be operated under the Laws of the US, which is why in 2016 the US removed itself from Internet Governance.

So do we put the Internet under the laws of China? or the EU both of which have Free Expression issues....

Which nation? or maybe the UN which has Dictators and human rights abusers in positions of power...

Decentralization is far far far better than looking to a government resolution

If you decentralize, you don't end up with something equivalent to "the internet" anymore -- you end up with several islands of things that (to varying degrees) resemble "the internet", and run on the same layer 4 fabric, but are largely isolated from one another.

I think we actually experience a mild version of this today, where entities publish their all their Twitter/Facebook/Instagram/Snapchat/Whatsapp/Linkedin etc profiles.

I can't help but see whatever this distributed DNS replacement is as basically being this situation but without the backstop of globally-accessible websites and e-mail addresses. You should have no doubt that, for example, Facebook would make a "the internet" which was 100% Facebook-operated sites.

Islands already exist, with national firewalls, corporate networks, dark nets, etc. Decentralization of DNS would just take middlemen out of the picture. A dominant decentralized system would probably handle most requests if one were to ever get off the ground, making it equivalent to what we have now.

Why?

DNS worked just fine with nonprofits and government entities who weren’t leeches.

But it no longer works fine. If there is money or power in something, it will inevitably get corrupted if it can be centralized or captured.

Why? Because even you are using the past tense. The genie is out of the bottle.

Because centralized power run by people gets corrupted and bogged down by special interests.

> Islands already exist, with national firewalls, corporate networks, dark nets

And you don't see companies posting their addresses on those things. They still advertise "example.org" not "if you're in {county} use {county-specific address}, or on Tor use {onion address} or using {decentralized DNS} use example.com".

> A dominant decentralized system

How does this result in a different situation then the "centralized" DNS we have today?

> How does this result in a different situation then the "centralized" DNS we have today?

If, for instance, the DNS entries were tied to entries in a blockchain, such as namecoin, then no 3rd party would be involved in a transaction to transfer the domain, no annual fees would be required, and no one could block or remove an entry.

> You should have no doubt that, for example, Facebook would make a "the internet" which was 100% Facebook-operated sites.

AOL already tried that back when they were still sending floppies through the mail. They were the largest ISP on earth and couldn't keep people in their little walled off corner of the internet. I don't think anyone else is going to be more successful.

They were probably more successful than you'd like to acknowledge. And the modern companies do have a fair bit more power.

They might not have been able to keep people there forever, sure. But their walled garden was “the internet” to a major chunk of people in the US for quite a long time.

Remember when TV commercials would tell you a company’s AOL keyword?

Yeah, that was around the time the internet wasn’t even relevant to the majority of the first world population. Trying to make comparisons to how it might look today is pointless.

At AOLs peak, it had about 35 million subscribers. Comcast alone has nearly that many.

Or when people would tell you their ICANN domain?

https://www.handshake.org/

Handshake Name Service (HNS) is working on this problem from an interesting angle, with some significant institutional support.

The problem is that DNS powers the internet as we know it, getting everything ever to switch over is at least another 30 years after you make a protocol (that would also need to have literally no downsides).

Not sure I agree. If FF & Chrome both supported it...it'd be in effect in < 5 years total.

Just look how quickly DoH is being rolled out, or Google's QUIC.

Realistically if Google, Mozilla, Cloudflare, Apple, Microsoft, and a few others agree that this move is bad, and wanted to stand up a new .org TLD...they could, and I don't believe it'd be illegal (IANAL).

Web is only small part of internet

Yes, but most of the internet is exposed to users via the web anyways. OSs would need to follow suit, sure — to make everything that’s not a browser work so that the alternative lookup mechanism is used instead of traditional DNS. How long do you think that would take? Not too long methinks.

Namecoin did this, and I think there are similar efforts on Ethereum, but it turns out that the tyranny of the installed base is a real thing.

All these Ethereum/Namecoin/Whatever solutions aren't really solutions. They're subject to namesquatting, arbitrary prices, arbitrary decisions regarding TLDs and they end up being centralized in the end for various reasons.

I think a good solution is to switch to using petnames instead of global names.

https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2006/02/petnames.html

.onion?

I liked Namecoin.

Ethereum Name Service is doing something similar on Ethereum.

We don't want DNS anymore, but we don't have a replacement. It's the same as Facebook->Diaspora, Twitter->Mastodon. The non-centralized versions are too hard to deploy to all the non-techies out there, despite being the "morally" correct architecture.

The only thing wrong with DNS is that we entrust it to a corrupt government. It's time another country step in and take control and replace ICANN.

> It's time another country step in and take control

What's to stop them from being just as corrupt? It's too much for any one country to have control over. It'd be far better to come up with a way to take the power out of the hands of any one entity so that we don't have to keep moving it around when the people holding all the power are inevitably corrupted by it.

Abandoning the whole idea of gTLDs and using only ccTLDs kinda accomplishes that, each country would control only their part.

ICANN is a non-profit organization, not a government entity.

I can't speak for Diaspora, but Mastodon isn't any harder to use than Twitter. It's mostly network effects that keep people there.

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