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Comment by donatj | Hacker News Reader

I remember in the late 90s there were at least a couple companies promoting alternative TLDs outside the standard set. I have no idea how that was implemented. Just special DNS servers with extra TLDs? Or something more involved on the OS levels?

Seems like there could be an appetite for such a thing these days. TLDs outside ICANNs control.

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It was an alternative DNS but I forgot which it was.

You had to switch to these DNS servers, which the added "benefit" that DNS queries returning NXDOMAIN were hijacked to show you ads.

I don't think this has any usefulness anymore, since gTLDs exist.

gTLDs cost hundreds of thousands of dollars. You can run your own DNS servers for waaay less.

I think the usefulness could come from community controlled TLDs. Might not be a mainstream thing but free libre TLDs for open source projects and what not?

Something similar to what Let's Encrypt did to the SSL Certificate market. Before they came along, SSL root certificate were way over priced and overnight, the market simply disappeared.

The same should happen to gTLDs.

IIRC, the cost is ~$200k one time and ~$25/yr. Shitcoins get magnitudes higher crowd funding. Not impossible to do at all.

On a technical level, this is very simple - just change the list of DNS root servers on all "participating" machines to point to your own new nameservers.

But then you have the problem: Who manages your community controlled domains? Who keeps track of who owns which domain?

OpenNIC is a project that replaces and extends the official DNS root maintained by Verisign.

http://opennic.org

Are there any notable websites actually on that infrastructure?

The ‘Project Showcase’ only shows a single example.

No. It's an old hobby project which has nearly fizzled out; the web site hasn't been updated in years.

Alternate roots are on thin ice in general nowadays, especially as there's no reasonable way to safely issue TLS certificates for domains which aren't under the ICANN root. (Running your own CA introduces a lot of messy trust issues and is inadvisable.)

Maybe if we switched from the current state of PKI with CAs to DNSSEC and DANE/TLSA, it would be easier.

But doing that would mean to either trust the current resolver you are using, which is unacceptable, as it's sometimes cloudflare or google, or running your own resolver on every device -- which also does not work. It is absolutely crucial for the DNS system we have today that there's a small number of resolvers that have large caches, otherwise root servers would blow up. Unless we massively start implementing some novel RFCs.

I think the common one was "new.net" and yes, it was just some kind of software extension that either added to or replaced your DNS queries. If you didn't have the software installed, you could still get to, say example.faketld by going to example.faketld.new.net

I remember them pushing to get ISPs to use their custom DNS, and I think there was least one major ISP that implemented it natively.

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

There are obvious examples of tlds outside of ICANN control:

* OpenNIC domains * .onion, .i2p and other alternative networks * .bit, .eth and other cryptocurrency backed domains

I can't think of one instance where ICANN has told a TLD to remove a domain at the second level. Maybe it happened in the past, but I'm drawing a blank.

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