Has anyone considered a hostile fork of .org? Set up an alternative root that initially mirrors PIR. Cache existing domains until their registration expires. Encourage domain owners to register with the fork using enticing terms. Like offering to rebate the cost of registering with PIR to be in both databases. Or offer much longer terms. Solicit ISPs to point their DNS to your root. Set a cut-off date that after which you'll stop resolving new domains registered with PIR. Give the internet the ability to vote with their feet and wallets who gets to be in charge of the root.
There have been various attempts at alternative DNS root [1] by people unhappy with ICANN.
In the past, these attempts haven't been able to convince ISPs to point their users to the forked service - even if they mirror every existing domain free of charge.
And you don't just have to convince domain registrants and end users; you need to bring mailserver administrators and certificate authorities along too.
I'm not saying it's impossible - Google could force things unilaterally with a change to Chrome, for example - but history shows users are slow to vote with their feet.
That's kind of what Handshake.org is trying to do, although instead of forking existing TLDs Handshake lets people register their own TLDs outside of the 1500 TLDs the ICANN has already provisioned. There have been many alternative root attempts in the past, but I think the only way for one to succeed is if it starts off by augmenting the existing system instead of making users choose between one or the other (that can come later).
The bigger "fuck you" to ICANN and the best option in general which would prevent similar issues from occurring in the future would be to move away from DNS and move to .onion addresses or something like namecoin instead.
We don't even need the majority of the world to start using them, we just need browsers to add support.
Not just .org moving into private hands is concerning, but the premise that a TLD, which is so widely used, can apparently move into the hands of a for profit is much more concerning to me. What if Verisign decided to sell .com to the highest bidder? Verisign's contract expires in 2024 so they might be able to get rid of price caps too. That would make .com hella valuable.
The people behind removing price caps, many are tied to VeriSign. Who do you think benefits most from this? They aren't vulnerable, they are the ones pushing it because they stand to gain the most.
Are petitions any useful? Did they ever have any significant impact? I understand it can help to put some visibility on a problem that is not widely known, but in my mind I still see these websites and Facebook groups of people signing petitions left and right with nothing concrete behind them.
EDIT: I didn't notice at first there was a rally, so I guess this is more than just a petition, but still I'm interested in other people opinion about petitions
"Are petitions any useful? Did they ever have any significant impact?"
They can be effective, depending on the balance between interests and the risk of PR backlash when the involved parties ignore them. Any decision is usually taken after careful planning of worst case scenarios like millions of people refusing to buy X product/brand for example or marching with signs against that product/brand, including of course viral campaigns or the big media covering the issue which is the worst they can think of. It's all about the money: if a petition whether directly or not results in a lot less money for the subject the petition was created against, then it has been effective.
In this case however I think the message should be a lot more clear. By reading the headlines it seems someone is attempting to buy some "dot.com" site or a fictional "(space).com" domain, which sends a completely wrong message.
This is likely the case where a more effective tabloid-like headline would work better.
Thanks for your detailed opinion on the subject, I agree with what you're saying, I'm currently watching the documentary "Marking a Murderer" which is on Netflix and I have to say, you can really see the shift of the story when internet began to become more and more available and popular.
I might have underestimated petitions, but seeing so many of them when internet was getting kind of popular probably gave me the wrong idea, things changes so quickly these days!
DNS is really a major technical and organizational weakness of the Internet. It is centralized, it is insecure, it lacks privacy. And now, apparently, it can be exploited for the profit or corrupt individuals. I think it is time to replace it by something else. It is by pure convention that we allow ICANN to administer it, we could change that tomorrow.
These are vague and strawman criticisms that deny reality and that DNS can't solve everything itself.
Who owns which domain will always be centralized if only one group or individual can own a particular name. Having multiple domain name systems creates chaos.
Privacy can be solved on the client-side with VPNs or DNS resolution encrypted proxies (dnscrypt) and private registration (by the owner).
Security (integrity and non-repudiation) already exists in the form of DNSSEC and DANE. It's a Catch-22 to say it's not when it clearly exists. It's imperfect but it does exist.
ICANN was supposed to/should've been a steward in the interests of all people, not just corporations.
You can't replace it with something else and expect a different result. All you're doing is moving problems around without addressing them. Emperor's new clothes won't fix that, sorry.
Fwiw DNSSEC was designed before modern crypto fundamentals were understood. It is a lackluster mechanism, and yet ICANN keeps trying to get people to use it.
DNSSEC and DANE are dead letters. After 25+ years of standardization effort, virtually no tech companies have adopted them. Its advocates cite bogus metrics like "number of signed zones" without disclosing that the overwhelming majority of those zones are signed automatically by registrars, which is security theater. No mainstream browser supports DANE, the key motivating feature for DNSSEC, and two browsers have introduced and then removed support for it. The major mail providers recently standardized MTA-STS specifically to avoid having to touch DNSSEC.
Have you checked out Handshake? It's doing exactly what you're proposing — creating a decentralized, private, secure alternative to traditional DNS. I wrote an article diving into the security benefits specifically https://www.namebase.io/blog/meet-handshake-decentralizing-d...
I mean isn't that essentially the deal you get when you're renting any property? Just because I've lived in my apartment for 20 years doesn't stop them from raising the rents when my lease renews once the area starts blowing up.
Look, I'm all for saving .org, I hope them the best, but it's not the end of the world for most websites where people are funneled there from search. There's probably a lot of internal IT stuff that would be annoying to migrate but that's nothing a split-horizon DNS can't put off.
> I mean isn't that essentially the deal you get when you're renting any property?
This isn't a model of internet that's good for anyone except the rent-seekers, and at this case the people who pay the cost are our most altruistic organizations.
In a larger sense, homelessness, housing inequality, and the rent being too damn high show that this isn't even a good way to do housing. If we're going to use real estate as a descriptive model for the internet, we should look at both the positives and the negatives and realize that real estate has fundamental problems we would like to avoid in the internet. Just because a model exists doesn't mean it's a good model to emulate.
If anything, I'd rather see DNS be free, with rules against domain squatting. The only reason I can see to associate a cost with registering a domain name is to prevent domain name squatting, and it's clear that cost is a larger barrier to good actors (actual domain users) than to bad actors (domain squatters).
This is more like you buying your house outright. Then after 20 years the registry of deeds decides to start demanding a stiff yearly maintenance fee, without which they'll remove your deed from their books and allow new registrants to substitute their own in its place.
That's silly. This is more like a map charging you to list your address. You make it sound like not owning wikipedia.org suddenly means they lose all their servers.
yeah...the political heart of protesting would be on the steps of City Hall downtown. They should be used to it by now, logistically speaking, given Occupy and the Women's March....
