Aws and cloudflare outages have taken down a significant portion of the web. No, the web isn't 100% centralized, but what percent is centralized to a small handful of players?
Unless your using an IP address for you website, your domain name is registered through a centralized registrar. The DNS architecture/protocol itself is centralized as it is controlled by ICANN.
It is not at all unlike Twitter taking away the handle @metaverse from a user and giving it to Facebook, it was only the result of user backlash/public support Twitter reversed its decision.
What’s your point? My point is that the internet is decentralized but many websites use centralized services as there’s some value in doing so.
There are tons of registrars and DNS is even more decentralized — it’s not like .ru has the same operators as .us or .aws.
The key question is how many parties can limit you. The DNS roots are stable and widely cached, so you don’t have bottlenecks based on those. Once you own a record in your hierarchy of choice, you can do whatever you want with it without needing to involve the roots in any way.
What happens, however, is that people voluntarily share infrastructure because it’s cheaper and easier for them to let Google operate their email, AWS their servers, etc. That’s different in a very key way: if you don’t like how it’s going, you can easily leave at any time. The centralization is weak — lose that competitive edge and the exodus begins.
The same thing has already happened in the blockchain world: theoretically you can be your own bank, IdP, etc. but in practice most people prefer to let other people manage those functions for them. Control of the blockchains, oracles, etc. similarly has a relatively small number of parties involved and it would be harder to change them than updating DNS records.
But those registrars only exist at the discretion of a single centralized authority (ICANN)
It doesn’t matter which registrar you use, ICANN can always take away your domain name and give it to someone else, no laws apply to protect your domain it is all subject to ICANN and their decision. They have taken away 10’s of registered thousands of domain names.
Alternatively there is no centralized authority that can take away a decentralized domain name such as ENS.
ENS is based on Ethereum, which is controlled by a smaller number of people and has already had one case where they rewrote history when it was financially advantageous. There is no reason to think that in a hypothetical future where ENS came to matter to anyone the same pressures wouldn’t apply because the critical flaw for ENS is the same one preventing popular use of blockchains in general: there’s no way to recover from mistakes or abuse. This is not an idle concern: domain theft happens regularly and there’s a process for recovering your domain:
https://www.icann.org/en/blogs/details/documentation-is-key-...
If ENS became popular there’s no chance that the same problem wouldn’t occur, and the value of a domain and risk to the public means that people would not accept the answer that the attacker won for all time. Something would happen - whether that’s the Ethereum developers rewriting history again, a global block or override list, or something else.
As a simple learning example, imagine that the Chinese government got the keys for Taiwanese government in a hack or someone stole the keys for Amazon. Do you think that the ENS community’s response would be to say there’s nothing to be done and Amazon should rebrand, or that anyone would continue to use ENS if they did?
All true, but doesn’t make ICANN not centralized.
>ENS is based on Ethereum…and has already had one case where they rewrote history when it was financially advantageous.
There is a difference between rewritten and forked. Nothing was rewritten, both chains exist. Similarly there is no centralized authority that prevents an individual or group from forking the blockchain, nor any central authority forcing users to the new fork.
Alternatively, you won’t have much success attempting to “fork” your own .com TLD because of conflict with DNS. Realistically even ENS potentially faces this risk with .eth conflicting with DNS at some point.
But as it relates to ENS on EVM, if you are suggesting Amazon could in anyway force the take over of Amazon.eth from another owner on the blockchain, it is not possible, not even the ENS DAO has that power. This may be a result of your misunderstanding that Ethereum was previously “rewritten”.
Local laws do not apply, there is no independent or impartial court, it is entirely centralized decision making by ICANN if they will take away your domain name and give it to someone else. It is exactly the same as when Twitter recently took away @metaverse handle from a active user and gave it to Facebook. At least in the case of Twitter when faced With user backlash and public support they reversed their decision and took @metaverse back from Facebook and returned it to the user. In practice ICANN is even more centralized than Twitter, because ICANN isn’t accountable to its users.
It’s clear you don’t know how ICANN words, and are entirely out of your depth wrt the definition of de/centralized. You likely also have a conflict of interest.
ICANN can do that for .com domains, because that's their TLD. They cannot do it for the TLDs they've already sold/aren't responsible for.
You can even purchase your own TLD from ICANN if you've got the money and create whatever domain names you want.
Maybe stop talking about stuff you've no clue about, otherwise you'll forever be a dunning kruger person