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Comment by realusername | Hacker News Reader

It's my personal opinion but there's been way to much overeach from governments, registrars and various bad middlewares to make me think that resolving without interference is the #1 problem with DNS, not trademarks.

The current DNS is a bit like having HTTP everywhere, we need to upgrade to a more secure scheme.

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ENS doesn't solve that problem though. Middlewares can still intercept requests, unless you download the whole blockchain locally. DoH or DoT solve the problem of snooping or changing DNS requests, or alternatively DNSSEC solves the problem of changing as well.

The part that blockchain addresses would actually get generally worse: typosquatting is already a problem, but at least most registrars are working to limit it - some more proactively than others. ENS removes any ability to prevent typosquatting at all. I have never heard anyone complain that registrars or governments are being TOO proactive in delisting typosquatters or those using domains they don't own the trademark for.

If you flip that over, then trademarks will become the #1 problem, not resolving without interference. It will be just as bad, but different.

Maybe you're thinking of trademarks as some bureaucratic intellectual property nonsense but they are practically important as well. I could own ycombinator.com in that system. What would you do about it besides changing the name of Y Combinator?

> Maybe you're thinking of trademarks as some bureaucratic intellectual property nonsense but they are practically important as well.

I do think their importance is vastly overstated yes but that's another debate.

Right now domains are also suspended for a lot of reasons, typosquatting being pretty much the only one I would describe as a valid reason. And the downsides of allowing domain suspension seems greater than the upsides.

I'd be okay changing my mind on the subject if DNS was used as intended and not as a political tool to suppress newspapers or block pirate websites.

Does DoH not solve this?

I don't think so because domains can still be suspended. It does solve some of the issues though

I haven't read RFC 882 all that thoroughly, but the section of it titled "Authority and administrative control of domains" strongly suggests that DNS from its very beginning allowed the name servers to implement whatever policies they wanted over the domain(s) they have authority over, so... DNS is actually working as intended?

You can't solve social problems with technical solutions, usually. One exception, for the time being, is Tor. But that's only temporary until they ban it.

We take a free internet for granted, but in places like China, the government knows exactly what you're doing on the internet. They have to, because they route your packets, and they won't send your packets to places they aren't already spying on. No technological solution can change that, except possibly by constructing a physically parallel internet, and that stops working when...

An FSF member recommended Tor to Uighurs. An Uighur responded: "You don't understand. They aren't just monitoring my Internet. They're living in my house."

> You can't solve social problems with technical solutions, usually.

I'd argue that historically it's the opposite, most social changes came from technical changes.

It's not about making it impossible to block websites but to increase the cost of doing it further.

There's a lot of in between places from Sweden to China and raising costs of doing the bad thing globally works.

Trademarks already have trouble on the Internet. Who gets dove.com, the chocolate company or the soap company? If I create a new Dove birdseed company and I register dove.biz will I get to keep it?

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