> A: Names have no owners in GNS, so there cannot be a "legitimate" domain owner. Any user can claim any name (as his preferred name or "pseudonym") in his NICK record. Similarly, all other users can choose to ignore this preference and use a name of their choice (or even assign no name) for this user.
This is confusing me. How is it not a problem that randoms can just claim other people's domains?
However, the protocol does not really care what kind of governance is chosen or present. In order to understand this a bit better I invite anyone to read section 1-3 of https://www.ietf.org/archive/id/draft-schanzen-gns-19.html
It's just the actual, practical DNS system that everybody actually uses which does.
There is a global name, which is a long non-human readable unique identifier. And there is a nickname, which is only really locally significant, although the zone can publish a preferred name, the local side doesn't have to respect it.
Granted, most people do not bother using this feature, but it is also true that most non-technical people don't even bother with typing a URL, they use a search engine as a proxy anyway.
In fact it would be a good idea, ecologically, to have a system that educate its users to give their own nickname to website they visit often and use them rather than performing a search query. Especially if it is as simple as clicking a "bookmark as 'xxxxx'" with xxxxx being the default name of the service/website in your browser, with a TOFU principle :).
The last main thing that I use domains for is verification (is this really "google.com"?) but even that is 1. Not effective (yes, I am definitely "goog1e.com") and 2. Mostly replaced by my browser doing the check for me (for example via my password manager which only fills in credentials for the correct domain).
This is literally what I'm saying and the main point I'm addressing in the second and third paragraph of the comment you are replying to.
However, you make a very good point with QR code: this is another argument for why the actual domain name is not that important.
So what is the point?
How does this system facilitate "discovery" when no one can discover your website by the human readable name you would like to assign to it?
You could imagine a system where you manage your DNS root zone locally ("hyperlocal") and there is NO consensus on what it contains. The DNS resolution mechanism could support such a concept. It is only the de-facto rule of ICANN over the root zone what makes DNS names globally unique. And IETF/Standards do not allow to diverge from this.
The GNS specification explicitly allows it. That is it. It does not mandate that users must bootstrap their root using fancy hand-picked petnames. In practice, a common set of root zone entries will very likely exists. The specification does not mandate the governance.
There could be a world in which DNS names as we know them today are resolved using the GNS resolution mechanism with no tangible difference to the user.
To make this practice work consistently, the .local TLD is specifically reserved for such use cases in mDNS.
Now I should mention, all TLDs should be reserved even if only used locally because of above security implications, but there’s nothing preventing people from abusing DNS in a local setting to resolve names differently than they do remotely.
Users anonymously subscribe to root zones that they trust, or act as their own authority.
The thing that protects you here is TLS and PKI and our agreed-upon global trust system of registrars and certificate authorities that have been built up. DNS itself is just one (very abuse-able) cog in that wheel.
For instance, if you live in China.
Let's say GNS gets traction. Users and implementation could provide a list of start zone mappings which are managed by ICANN and use this as a default. Effectively, this will give users global names. Just like now. .de will be managed by DENIC, .fr will be managed by AFNIC etc.
BUT: GNS is designed to allow to override such a setting. The ICANN root zone may be delegated by the user into the .icann namespace. So, locally, example.com in DNS would become example.com.icann in GNS. Alternatively, the user may also override ANY TLD mapping provided by the ICANN configuration - or individual domains - if needed. For example, if a domain is seized or otherwise censored in DNS.
There are pros and cons to this approach but the point is not to exactly replicate DNS.
The domain itself can have a preference, but the user is free to ignore it. Which does mean that a domain is not as definitive as it is, in the case of DNS.