Plus, if these protocols are built on top of cryptographic methods, it might not be so easy for the providers to do something fishy in the first place.
Relying on a centralized competitor to offer something better would be dubious. If they gain substantial marketshare there's nothing stopping them from deciding to simply swap back to our current system. It could even be done retroactively since everybody has those lines in their terms and conditions that amount to 'We can do anything, and you can't do anything about it.'
But with a decentralized system you have the possibility of a new type of domain where while one operator may be able to be the only one that can create them, once they transfer that domain to you it becomes literally impossible for them to access, change, or affect it in any way, shape, or form. Decentralization is able to turn various digital goods into something much closer to their physical counterpart where you are buying something that is no longer connected to the seller after checkout. And this can really help ensure the integrity of services that otherwise might be susceptible to bait and switch business models.
Is there any legal or technical reason why someone can't set up a DNS server that resolves domain names to different IP addresses than those traditionally used?
So why does no-one do this/ Obviously people do do it for ad-blocking, so why not for other purposes? Too difficult to get traction, perhaps?
If I decide I want to have my personal website be called google.com I can edit my hosts file to point google.com to my webserver and everything works for me, but anybody else going to google.com is going to get Google's page instead unless I somehow convince them to edit their files or use my weird DNS server.
Even if I come up with some great reason that makes people want to accept that google.com is better when it goes to my website instead, what happens when someone else decides they should be able to use google.com for something else and they convince a bunch of people to use their weird DNS server? We could fragment the DNS all over the place and have several conflicting entries for every popular domain name depending on what DNS server you're using but is that really better?
OpenNIC has a lot of non-ICANN domains but runs in a fashion similar to ICANN (central organization deciding rules for TLDs). Iirc there are some small non-US communities that use this a lot.
There are also a decent amounts of crypto TLDs (.bit for namecoin, Ethereum has a couple, etc).
There are of course a lot of corporations that use custom DNS domains for internal purposes, like .corp or .internal or the like.
It is difficult to get people to change their DNS serves en masse to something non-standard. The lack of being able to get real TLS certificates is also an issue though there is work in this direction: OpenNIC is developing a traditional CA afaik and namecoin has some experimental stuff to support DNSSEC and TLSA to have TLS certs enforced by the blockchain.
> A domain isn't much more than a key/value pair in a small database.
No, it's often a huge investment and important part of security approaches (certificates, validation, email, etc.)
> You're paying never-ending rent to them for them to not go out of their way to delete your entry.
Yes, you're paying them to not update that value to point to someone else's server. Just like you pay your landlord to not only keep your apartment in working order, but to not let someone else live there.
> becomes literally impossible for them to access, change, or affect it in any way, shape, or form
How is this a good thing? Someone takes over your domain and nobody is able to get it back? You just spent millions of dollars on marketing to get people to visit your somenameforme.tld and now it points to another site because your key leaked. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯?
https://consumer.ftc.gov/consumer-alerts/2019/10/sim-swap-sc...
You are not going to be able to pay extra to make rotten to the core pretty.
Unfortunately wallets have their cons too, and there are a lot of people who have lost their passwords or thumbdrives and thus access to their crypto.
No silver bullet.
You could say that’s actually a better outcome than losing your private key.
But yeah, the moment you have key recovery, even if it's decentralised and requires multiple parties, you aren't 100% in charge anymore.
But, it's probably a good alternative to being 0% in charge with custodial wallets.