So, internet names have been taken out of the sole jurisdiction of the US legal system, and now are international...
* Route graph of the internet, from Wikipedia
So, on one hand, people are worrying that taking ICANN and IANA out of US government oversight and putting it into the general control of all governments is 'giving away the internet', let's not forget that the USA has been abusing this power for some time already.
Buried deep towards the bottom of this article, you can find this:
That isn't to say that the misuse of the domain name system for censorship isn't a real concern. But that danger existed last week under the NTIA's oversight, just as much as it continues to exist today. While EFF stayed out of the IANA transition debate, we do keep a watchful eye on ICANN where it comes to the misuse of its policies and processes to censor Internet content. By exercising pressure on domain name registrars and registries, it's possible for law enforcement agencies and rightsholders (both within and without the United States) to exact finer-grained censorship, picking off individual domains that are alleged to host unlawful or undesirable content. This is a far greater and more present danger that continues to receive far less public attention than the IANA transition.
The foregoing paragraphs really were full of lies, saying that the concern about the increase of censorship is overblown coughbullshitcough. Yes, already with the DMCA and all that jazz, it was already becoming a big problem, but now China and Russia and Buttf*kistan can also embargo DNS addresses. What kind of naivete makes people think they wont?
DNS is such a dangerously centralised system anyway, already. It is about time that there was a decentralised system that cannot be controlled. DNS itself has long been a serious security problem anyway, you can use port 53 to tunnel around a lot of places that you really should not be able to.
But it's even worse that we can now potentially see, and most likely will see, backwards, repressive regimes exercising power to restrict access to name service according to arbitrary dictates that might be legal in one place but not in others, and reach across international boundaries in ways that is very damaging to the free movement of information.
We already more or less have a potential replacement in the form of Namecoin, but namecoin has been spammed up pretty hard and I think that in fact this is something that the developers of Steem have been hashing out recently, about 2 months ago I was told that they are working on a name system for Steem, and I still see nothing so presumably that's because there is a lot of abuse-related issues to be dealt with.
A blockchain name system has a much bigger problem than a manual system like exists right now. Registering names can be spammed. When I spoke to Ned, he talked about the idea that there would be a rental fee per time something like the transaction fee for bitcoin.
But it would have to be bigger, and there would have to be per-IP rate limiting as well, and then you have the question of how you distribute the fees for registration without advantaging one party over others. Do you burn it, like the promotion system, or do you share it out like the voting system?
We can't stop here! This is Whale country!
Loki was born in Australia, now lives in Sofia, Bulgaria. IT generalist, physics theorist, futurist and cyber-agorist. Loki's life mission is to establish a secure, distributed layer atop the internet, and enable space migration.
I'm a thoughtocaster, a conundrummer in a band called Life Puzzler. I've flipped more lids than a monkey in a soup kitchen, of the mind. - Xavier, Renegade Angel
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