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Comment by Closi | Hacker News Reader

If ICANN wasn't just a giant extortion racket they would have yanked this from Google squatting on it years ago - clearly they haven't actually met any of the listed goals considering they have never used the TLD (or opened them for general availability like their original application implies).

In reality all ICANN cares about is $$$

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Hasn't that been obvious for years? As far as I remember there were attempts to sell of lucrative parts of ICANNs responsibilities to private businesses that where coincidentally owned by the very people that made the decision to sell. The whole organization is openly corrupt and doesn't really try to hide it.

Yes, ICANN planned to sell the Public Interest Registry, responsible for .org, to a private equity group.

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

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fadi_Chehad%C3%A9

Note that the co-founder of Ethos was the former CEO of ICANN. The PIR sale was stopped but it looks like Ethos still ended up with the company actually contracted to operate the .org registry and the .org DNS provider. That whole sequence was and is outrageous.

ICANN makes a cut of every registration, not just the TLD application fee, or the quarterly registry fees.

ICANN has LOTS of problems, but it is actually incentivized to see TLDs in general availability.

Google will have paid ICANN $500k just to read the application for these TLD's ($185k * 3) and has paid them an additional $500k since then just to maintain them.

I'm not wholly convinced that ICANN is operating solely out of a sense of generosity. It sounds to me more like "pay me a lot of money and I will look after you" (i.e. a protection racket). I suspect ICANN is actually motivated to look after google as a high-paying customer and registrar, rather than be what they should be, which is acting independent, treating everyone the same, and not just using everything as an opportunity to cash-grab.

TBF, 500k + 500k for controlling 3 TLDs (333k/TLD) is not a lot of money. For Google it's a rounding error.

It sometimes is astounding how cheap bribery can be, right?

When you sell 1,200 TLDs it ends up being good money.

ICANN manage to make $200 million a year for just managing a database of 300 million value key pairs and 1200 tlds.

#Web3 Fixes this

Don't know if this is a joke. "Web3" makes problems like this even more complicated because domain name resolution needs a single central point of trust.

I'm sure someone can make an ICO to "solve" that problem, write a white paper and promptly disappear after the pump and dump is over.

Web3 has been used to mean too many things (NFTs ETH crypto etc). Blockchains offer the ability to fix centralized choke points on the Internet, and some prefer Dweb (decentralized web) as a term to describe this.

Oh god, I don't need my domain to be another form of currency.

If Web3 ever becomes a thing I look forward to seeing the chaos that ensues when the inevitable happens, and a major domain name gets stolen with absolutely zero dispute resolution and where the attackers can also hijack all incoming traffic to steal credentials or install malware. Then it will be mathematically impossible to recover without paying whatever ransom the attackers like for the return (if the attackers even decide they want to sell!).

DNS Poisoning was bad enough, this would be a total wipeout.

Please don't take HN threads on generic flamewar tangents. The last thing we need is to repeat that one over again.

That's not to say there can't be substantive discussion about Web3 but it would need to be seeded with interesting new information, not a throwaway one-liner.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Yes! We could manage internet addressing on the blockchain instead!

DNS is quite distributed already but it’s far from “democratic”. Instead of domain squatting and hoarding through through multiple private companies, we could domain squat through… multiple _other_ private companies. That’s Real Democracy™.

We could even speculate with domain names and tlds and maybe steal them from each other in completely new and exciting ways.

Maybe we could make it so only the early adopters can afford these tlds or domain names for a reasonable price and then everyone else could prop up its price until a rug pull happens.

What if we we make this system consume an insane amount of energy? Our current solution is probably inefficient in certain ways, but we can always go further!

There’s lots of possibilities! #web3FixesThis

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