Comment by hardaker | Hacker News Reader

Comment by hardaker | Hacker News Reader

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I think this could go on for pages and pages more, and we can't get the entire industry to agree on the importance of any particular bullet point yet. I'd love to sit down face-to-face sometime and debate this endlessly, but I've done that with a lot of people on all sides already and there is no easy answer that any conversation has come to. It is never as easy as one side of the argument ever wants it to be.

> If I need some namespace for my open source project, I can go and register a top level domain

One common question here is: if you have an open source project, why do you need a TLD? Why is that special? the TLDs are designed into the DNS space and exceptions aren't cheap. Registering a domain under .org, or .horses is cheap compared to the $185k. And using something under .alt is free. Justifying the need for a TLD is difficult when there are other options.

>> The real thing is: why are alternate spaces even caring whether or not they look like the DNS and have a TLD? > Because they want to be supported by existing software.

That's exactly the point I was making: the goal is to get the cheap way out trying to register part of an existing landscape rather than inventing a new universe. If the new universe is that much better, then everyone will want to deploy it anyway. As the web browser market will tell you, their applications (the only ones that most people care about these days [not me, mind you]) update ever 3 months. Getting them on board with a new universe should be trivial! In fact some browsers already support alternate spaces. Green-slate designs are often much cleaner and better when people aren't trying to do a mix of revolutionary and evolutionary approaches.

> if you have an open source project, why do you need a TLD? Why is that special?

It's not really a matter of whether it's a TLD, though that makes more sense in this context because putting it under some existing TLD like .org would imply to most people that it isn't a separate namespace. And you can see how forcing their names to be of the form myboard.chan.example.horses is putting the alternative at an unnecessary disadvantage vs. just myboard.chan or even myboard.chan.nic when neither .chan nor .nic are existing ICANN top level domains.

You also want it to be designated as a separate namespace, because it is. That makes the stakes much higher than they are for an individual domain name so it shouldn't be possible to lose it in a divorce or to a stickup artist if someone fails to renew it etc.

> That's exactly the point I was making: the goal is to get the cheap way out trying to register part of an existing landscape rather than inventing a new universe. If the new universe is that much better, then everyone will want to deploy it anyway.

Of course they don't want to invent a new universe. Who is going to use a web browser that can only resolve names in a new namespace and can't resolve youtube.com or wordpress.org? And why would someone want that, instead of being able to do both?

To provide a practical example, Tor Browser can resolve both .onion sites and ordinary web pages. Then the .onion sites can link to ordinary ones -- or vice versa, if the ordinary site is inclined to provide a link that only works in Tor Browser.

An upstream nameserver couldn't do that because it onion sites don't have an IP address to put in the response for an ordinary browser, but Namecoin sites do. Which is why there isn't a separate "Namecoin Browser" -- you don't need one.

> As the web browser market will tell you, their applications (the only ones that most people care about these days [not me, mind you]) update ever 3 months. Getting them on board with a new universe should be trivial!

I detect that you're deploying sarcasm because you know that is non-trivial. But then I'm not sure what your point is supposed to be. Are you insisting that people do the thing you know makes their endeavor more likely to fail?

> Green-slate designs are often much cleaner and better when people aren't trying to do a mix of revolutionary and evolutionary approaches.

This seems like telling someone who wants to make electric cars that they're wrong to want them to work on the same roads as gasoline cars.

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