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Comment by devwastaken | Hacker News Reader

What would happen if browsers just decided to make their own name service? Does icann have some sort of protection on domain names? Given that we already use Google or cloudflare DNS, why not just make a competing nameservice and throw icann to the curb?

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They are.

1. HandyBrowser (supports handhshake): https://github.com/HandyMiner/HandyBrowser

2. TorBrowser: https://www.torproject.org/

3. Opera: https://unstoppabledomains.com/opera

4. Status.im: https://status.im/

5. Brave: https://brave.com/

6. Unstoppable: https://unstoppabledomains.com/browser

7. Blockstack: https://blockstack.org/install

Probably few more - maybe dozens.

For major DNS providers, nextdns supports handshake.

0] https://handshake.org/

1] https://nextdns.io/

These are namespaces with their own browsers, not browsers with their own namespaces

Browsers are just small part of the Internet , we already use lot of internet outside the browser in the form of apps , email etc .

Some people know and can use chose their DNS , many have to rely whatever dns their ISP or corporate IT provides . Very hard to move all that to common new standard

Browsers esp chrome/safari as it is modify the URL way more than I am comfortable with .

As bad as ICANN is I really don’t want Apple and google dictating how dns should run

What if people used a de facto whitelist of IP addresses locally mapped to names in, for example, /etc/hosts? This is how the internet worked in its earliest days, after all. I'm not saying this is a good idea, but it's interesting because it also serves the interest of Google and Facebook, so they might promote the technique. Since people will only be able to see content from a small portion of the internet (the part they have in their local file), and would give content hosted by the big players a huge advantage. It would also have the interesting effect of making "raw IP" addresses more visible, and special, easily remembered IPv4 addresses more valuable!

This does not sound like an improvement over the status quo to me.

You want to go back to 90's?

The 80s

I wouldn't say it serves the interest of Google, because then you couldn't get to all the websites linked from Google Search.

That's fine, Google rehosts them all on AMP anyway and often people don't even click through past the search results page.

All you would get would be buttons that downloaded applications who would add a line in your host file when run.

You lose so much without DNS where each site/service controls their own domain.

Consider modern hosting: Load balancers, CDNs, etc all configured and deployed on-demand, with the IPs changing as frequently as the provider likes.

Sure, Amazon lets you get static IPs.. but now I want to re-point traffic at another region because this region is failing, or down for maintenance... sorry, no, can't do that.

Anyone doing even moderate amount of hosting/whitelabelling doesn't have anywhere the IPs they need.

It's silly to talk about this as if we'd throw out dns entirely...

To address the original concern, all we'd have to do is throw out the ICANN root and replace it with a root controlled by a new NOTICANN organization. People were already talking about this when the .org debacle was still playing out.

It might even be healthy for the internet to do this every so often as a warning to those who would dare to try something like this again. They serve at our pleasure.

We're all just agreeing to use their root for convenience. As soon as it stops being convenient, we can literally just decide to give it to someone else.

Answer to Q1: Don't care. Software that does not honour /etc/resolv.conf is a PITA.

Answer to Q2: No. They have mass cooperation from network admins and DNS software authors to use ICANN roots.

Answer to Q3: Go for it. I have been running a non-ICANN root for myself over 20 years.

Well, there's OpenNIC — https://www.opennic.org

Please don’t give storm any ideas

Wasn't Tor's .onion basically separate from ICANN until 2015?

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