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Comment by xemoka | Hacker News Reader

All this BS with ICANN, what other options are out there to replace them? Some decentralised solution would be great, I guess Namecoin is trying...

What other options are there that you're aware of?

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

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Handshake.org is another contender that's launching soon. I wrote a blog post exploring some of the security benefits of Handshake[1] which got a lot of discussion on HN[2].

[1] https://www.namebase.io/blog/meet-handshake-decentralizing-d... [2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20995969

You could replace them with a centralized solution even. All you need is general agreement to use new root name servers. The new system could even fallback to the old one, providing a transition period.

Could probably be done by Microsoft, Apple & Google getting together and deciding how to split the billions and how much they toss the Linux Foundation & Firefox to come along for the ride. It doesn't have to be a great deal, just a better one than ICANN and its landlords provide.

OpenNIC looks like the easiest replacement, they mention some other TLDs they're peered with on their front page such as emerDNS which is decentralized.

That doesn't work for anyone who wants their site accessible to the public though, since it won't resolve. Maybe once a few ISPs switch and Google, OpenDNS etc. change their resolvers it'll be a possibility.

OpenNIC is no different than ICANN aside from being a failure. It just appears to be better since it uses a talk track that's attractive, but structurally, it's probably even worse than ICANN.

Names are hard. There are things like namecoin but so far they haven’t worked out.

With Namecoin and ENS what's missing are easy to use browser add-ons for Chrome and Firefox (and Safari)

For ENS you can resolve names by just installing Metamask. The wallet part of Metamask is not easy to use, but if you just want to brows ENS domains I don't think it can get lower friction than that.

It does look like that exists: https://peername.com/browser-extension/

Why a browser add-on? That's a really bizarre way to do that and it only fixes interactive web browsing. There is a lot more to networking than web browsers!

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