My thoughts were that DNS-level censorship is essentially a dead end because the root servers are sacrosanct, and there will always be secondary DNS servers to query, who then use the root servers.
Sucks for DNS providers in authoritarian countries though.
In the meantime it might be worthwhile to develop alternatives, like some kind of DNS-over-Tor or DNS-over-DHT scheme, along with normalizing Tor onion services as an alternative access method for clearnet sites.
https://www.kraken.com/learn/what-is-ethereum-name-service-e...
All the things that crypto true believers believed would happen are slowly coming to pass. It wasn't all bored apes and gambling. There was some legitimate developing going on, and still is.
I’m not ideologically against cryptocurrency-based solutions, but it isn’t a magic bullet by any means. I still think that the EU in particular isn’t done making life difficult for crypto users.
Not to discourage projects like ENS, I think it’s good to have alternatives, but I do think we need noncommercial fallbacks to the current system as well. Anything involving money will always have choke points.
This is the problem with crypto discourse - people view the guy selling snake oil on the sidewalk outside the gas station on the same level as legitimate infrastructure project that is the combined work product of hundreds of people who aren't trying to scam anyone, just make useful stuff.
The only solution to this is being willing to learn about the technology, which is a very unpopular view on HN.
Additionally, the EU could block purchase of ENS from exchanges. This added friction, though minor, is enough to slow uptake. I look at Monero as an example. It is functional and stable and it does what it claims. Yet hardly anyone uses it, because it has been effectively fenced off through a series of very low hurdles. It is not hard to swap to Monero for privacy, so why don’t more people do it?
IMHO ordinary users are much more likely to install a resolver that doesn’t have any connection to cryptocurrency. (The media campaign against crypto has been very effective.)
I do think crypto people ought to keep trying to develop their tools: there is some utility in it, and it may be more useful as things evolve. But it’s not a panacea, and the fact that it is “digital money” makes operators legally more vulnerable to attacks and regulation under current laws and legal precedents. Distributed, digital-only, non-monetary, volunteer-run networks like Tor are legally very resilient for now, at least in the West. (That could change, but it hasn’t yet.)
However, the root server operators merely publish what ICANN (via the IANA functions) produces.
If the US (either federal or perhaps even the states of California or Virginia) were to decide to "censor" a TLD in the root zone, they would simply go to ICANN, PTI (the folks who provide the IANA functions under contract to ICANN) or, more likely, Verisign (who generate and publish the root zone under contract to ICANN) and demand the root zone be modified.
Registries do get block orders. When the Swedish registry got that for piratebay they choose to treat it like a domain dispute and gave ownership of the domain to the police, which the police in turn could treat like any other taken property and auction it out. The trouble is when the police wanted to destroy it, as there isn't a good definition on how to destroy a name so it can never be used again, and the registry was not keen on allowing the concept of a block.
The way you "destroy" a name is either to not delegate it or give it to the Registrar of Last Resort (https://www.rolr.eu).
In theory the law makers could specify this in law as form of registry regulation, but no one want to do that just to address one or two court cases where this question comes up. The registrar of last resort doesn't give any direct answer to those questions either.
In general, the vast majority of registries are fine with marking particular domains as "allocated but not delegated" as long as they get paid. ISTR ICANN waiving their fees, so the costs of marking a domain as undelegatable essentially turn in lost opportunity cost, which most registries are willing to eat.
But long ttls and caches would mostly break this as an approach
Better still, one can run one's own private root content DNS server. I've been doing that (in several ways) for a couple of decades. If ICANN decided to blackhole (say) www.microsoft.com. tomorrow, my DNS lookups wouldn't be affected.
To affect them, the aforementioned "court action" would have to target Verisign.