
Lawmakers Warn Against Private Equity Firm's .Org Takeover - miles
https://gizmodo.com/top-lawmakers-warn-against-private-equity-firms-org-ta-1840612552
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kingludite
Asking the right questions starts with looking at the wrong candidates. Is a
central-control domain system a good idea? What else is there? What else can
one think of? Is trusting anyone good architecture? Is there still hope to
implement something else? Are domain names the first kind of e-coin? Are the
keepers innovative companies or just rent seekers? Do the customers have any
influence or are TLD's an unavoidable monopoly?

~~~
bob1029
Central control over this type of resource is demonstrably a good idea. Domain
naming, considering the global scope and collision possibilities, is analogous
to the electromagnetic spectrum from a regulatory perspective. If we didn't
have the FCC and instead relied on private entities to regulate our radio
spectrum, I am almost certain we would be amidst technological anarchy on a
daily basis. Even with the FCC as the central authority, we continue to have a
number of conflicts that come up. It would seem as technology progresses this
space is getting harder and harder to manage. Satellites, self driving cars,
next-generation cellular communications...

I hesitate to start involving real-world geopolitics, but perhaps this is yet
another compelling use case for a body such as the UN. Perhaps you don't trust
one nation (e.g. the USA) to administer the entire domain naming system, but
you would almost certainly trust a quorum of (ideally peaceful and democratic)
nation states to do so.

~~~
zrm
Wireless spectrum isn't a great analogy for domain names. Spectrum is
extremely scarce in practice, names aren't. There are hundreds of bits of
entropy available so we're never going to run out of domain names even in an
individual TLD. Even _good_ names aren't particularly scarce because there are
so many TLDs.

The real issue here is that once you start using a name, it becomes a
dependency. You may not have any preference for example.org over example.us on
day zero but you sure do after you've been using one of them for a decade.

So the thing that works really well looks a lot like Namecoin, but not quite.
You do want some modest annual maintenance cost per name just to discourage
squatting on short/common names and cause people to return names to the
available namespace once they're not using them anymore. What you don't want
is for anybody to be able to ever cancel an active registration or change the
terms or cost once a name is already registered.

You could do that with blockchain like Namecoin, or you could do it through
legislation or contracts. Either way, it shouldn't be possible for anybody to
cancel or change the terms of a registration for a name that's already
registered, and that's the biggest failing of the existing system.

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bob1029
Yes the spectrum is scarce in practice, but in theory it doesn't need to be.
The problem in practice is that there are massive chunks of extremely useful
spectra locked up in legacy telecommunications stacks that make the spectral
efficiency of 4G look like an impossible feat by comparison.

If we had a magic wand and could instantly put everything on a standardized
global DSSS/CDMA-style scheme (across any arbitrary frequency ranges), I feel
we would have far more to go around.

~~~
zrm
That doesn't really change the comparison. It would be better if we made more
efficient use of the wireless spectrum, but if we did then people would just
replace more copper and fiber with wireless. The wireless spectrum would still
be in contention as a scarce resource in a very practical sense.

By contrast, people registering every possible domain name is never going to
happen. Just the computational resources necessary to do that don't even exist
in the world.

What makes a name valuable isn't that names are rare, it's that people know
your name. Things point to it. So we don't really need to ration them but we
do need to make it so that once a name is yours, it stays yours. Nobody should
be able to hold your own name hostage from you.

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mikro2nd
Does anybody know whether `.ngo` and `.ong` -- also managed by PIR -- are part
of the package? Hunting around on the PIR website produced no hint either way.

