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Comment by mikedilger | Hacker News Reader

Existing .org domains they can't move without overwhelming disruption, so most will just pay whatever it costs. But for the future, we need to move the Internet towards having peering relationships with TLDs such as OpenNIC.net.

Motivations:

* This issue of .org being sold for profit

* The fact that OpenNIC had to rename their TLD domains (e.g. .free to .libre) when ICANN created a colliding .free domain, demonstrating clearly that they are not peers.

Internet technologies such as browsers and operating systems should recognize ICANN and OpenNIC roots as peers, with DNSSEC to both. Should ICANN decide to create a .libre domain, existing browsers and operating systems should consider it a DNS attack and not recognize it. I think an organization like Mozilla ought to (1) flesh out any technical challenges, (2) support OpenNIC and (3) push for this.

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OpenNIC is a poorly managed amateur project, built on shoddy infrastructure that was thrown together in the early 2000s -- it's completely incapable of acting as any kind of peer to the ICANN root. In particular:

- Their resolvers are not consistently available. Many of them are hosted on public cloud hosts (which also raises some questions about their security), and outages are not uncommon.

- It's not clear that they support DNSSEC, or that they have any plan to do so.

- The governance of the OpenNIC-specific zones that they offer is even shoddier than the DNS root itself. Most of them have no registry/registrar distinction, no domain transfer process, no WHOIS services, and sketchy to nonexistent abuse policies.

- Since OpenNIC TLDs cannot be resolved on the public Internet, it's impossible to issue a SSL certificate for one.

Most of your points are valid. That's why I'm suggesting Mozilla support it. It would be a lot less "shoddy" if someone shepherded it. I think it is the right idea.

The last point is only true because they aren't recognized, which recognition would immediately fix, therefore it is moot.

My concern would be that it's enough of a mess that Mozilla would have an easier time building an equivalent project from the ground up than reshaping this one into something reasonable.

I could be convinced that a community-based restructuring of DNS could be for the better. But I don't think that OpenNIC is the right project to base that around. The technical aspects of what they've built are not complicated, and much of that would need to be changed anyway to operate at scale; good governance is a lot harder to build.

Full disclosure here, I am the host of the ".epic" TLD on OpenNIC.

Knowing the maintainers of the project and the community at large, I doubt they'd take kindly to opening up the project to Mozilla's support/control. They've ran a tight game, relying on their own money and individual donations. Opening it up to Mozilla's big money would bring the democracy aspect of the project into compromise.

Personally, I'd find it interesting to see where OpenNIC would go with that kind of investment, though. I've poured plenty of my time and money into the project, and would like to see it grow. Perhaps not at the expense of the projects principles, though.

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