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Comment by _factor | Hacker News Reader

Why is it we can’t use any DNS service by now? I want to use a completely alternate list that has the main domains like Google, Apple, Microsoft, and whoever wants to list, but doesn’t register everything like the global DNS system.

Seems silly we deify one DNS pay to play scheme when we can easily point to alternate DNS. As it stands the world has a naming scheme monetized and owned through no merit or logic based system, just entrenchment.

.onion kind of does this with privacy. .eth (ew) kind of does too, but critical mass is unlikely.

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Global consensus on naming is pretty valuable. Nobody big is going to use an alternate root, especially an alternate root that potentially conflicts with the ICANN root.

There have been alternate roots, with alternate TLDs, but adoption is nearly zero. .onion works a little bit because it's part of TOR. I'm not convinced .eth works, but maybe it's somewhat viable???

For everything else, a mediocre domain name can usually be found at low cost, and if it's too much, there are many domains that offer free subdomains, although you might not like the neighborhood.

.onion is an RFC 6761 Special-Use top-level and is described more fully in RFC 7686. It's probably not to be described as part of an alternate DNS root system.

alternative roots exist but they will not be taken seriously by operating system vendors (for damned good reasons that are touched on by RFC 2826 - https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/rfc2826).

You're free to use alternative roots. This doesn't quite address the structure of domain registration (the ICANN regime, perhaps?) because that's a different thing altogether, but kind of related. kind of.

I personally do not want to live in a world where there are competing roots. You would have massive fragmentation, confusion, poisoning, spoofing, severe trust issues. It's not going to happen.

EDIT: oh shit, it actually is happening. sad: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sovereign_Internet_Law

Anyone can set up a DNS provider, browsers make it easy to specify an alternate IP address. A pihole for instance has a list of domains it black holes to provide ad blocking etc, NSA provides “Protective DNS” to government contractors that refuses to resolve known malicious domains (via Akamai Govshield [0]), trick is getting anyone to use it. You’re not wrong about entrenchment being the main factor but hey, it ain’t called a network effect for nothin’ !

[0] https://www.nsa.gov/About/Cybersecurity-Collaboration-Center...

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