5 ms·

Do you really own a domain name or just a fixed term lease that may be revoked by multiple parties and by multiple means?

kpil 9y ago
Found a company, register a trademark in the same name in all relevant jurisdictions, hire a legal team that are trawling the internet and the world in general for trademark abuse so the trademark is defended. Hope that some registrar or internet body do not change a policy of some sort or another. Did I miss something?
- Laforet 9y ago
  There is no guarantee you'd win in court, especially if your domain is seized by a state level actor. This is why I think private keys combined with some kind of immutable log (cough...blockchain...cough) are far better as identity tokens than anything based on DNS.
  - subway 9y ago
    Identity tokens only implement the underlying address space. Friendly identifiers either have to be immutable (read:nearly worthless), or handled by some form of registry. First come, first served registey with some form of expiry implemented via smart contracts might be possible, but it seems unlikely any one registry would ever become 'the canonical registry', as that just puts is back in the same situation as DNS. This is a hard problem to solve without asking folks with big sticks/guns to enforce policy decisions.
    - Laforet 9y ago
      I am not sure if there has to be a "canonical" registry. For example, most western countries have multiple competing credit rating agencies reporting on individual identities and the system seems to work okay on that aspect. I will give my ideas more thought down the road. We have already tried this with PGP but it had too many issues to be practical. In any case, whatever we end up building is going to be better than DNS which is one entity with too many pairs of hands controlling it, all the way from ICANN to the registries to malicious social engineers.
    - hosh 9y ago
      Juan Benet of Protocol Labs was talking about how naming things is really a consensus problem (ep 15 on the Y Combinator podcast)
pdonis 9y ago
You own your domain name in the same sense that you own any property in a society where governments have overwhelming force at their disposal. Yes, if the government really, really wants to take your ownership away, they can. But it's still a lot harder and a lot rarer than having ISPs screw over their customers.
- PhasmaFelis 9y ago
  > You own your domain name in the same sense that you own any property in a society where governments have overwhelming force at their disposal. You might as well say "...in any society." If a government doesn't claim a monopoly on violence, someone else will.
  - dragonwriter 9y ago
    > You might as well say "...in any society." If a government doesn't claim a monopoly on violence, someone else will. Whichever entity (even if nominally a collection of entities considered together) has (whether or not it claims) a monopoly on the legitimate use of force is the government, whatever it calls itself.
    - PhasmaFelis 9y ago
      That's pretty much the point I was trying to make. A society without a government that monopolizes force can't really exist, or at least not for long.
      - mtgx 9y ago
        I think you've just crushed a lot of libertarian dreams. But you're right. If there is no official and relatively accountable government, it would be just some war lord of some other type of bully taking over and demanding their own "tax" to let you be in any given area.
      - pdonis 9y ago
        > A society without a government that monopolizes force can't really exist, or at least not for long. This is falsified by many historical examples. I gave one upthread (some of the American colonies, such as Pennsylvania in the early 1700s). Another would be saga period Iceland, which existed for several centuries with no government that monopolized force. I think history does show that societies without a government that monopolizes force are vulnerable to a failure mode which basically consists of an outside entity being willing to invest enough resources to overwhelm the force available within the society, and thus establishing a government by takeover. This is what happened in both of the examples I gave above (Iceland was taken over by the King of Norway, and Pennsylvania ended up caught up in the general tightening of everything when the British decided to get tough on the colonies after the French and Indian War). In other words, any time a group of people try to set up for themselves a place where they can live the way they want to, interfering with no one else and with no one else interfering with them, it doesn't last; someone else always ends up coming in and taking over and trying to tell them what to do. I view this as a bug, not a feature.

kpil 9y ago

Found a company, register a trademark in the same name in all relevant jurisdictions, hire a legal team that are trawling the internet and the world in general for trademark abuse so the trademark is defended. Hope that some registrar or internet body do not change a policy of some sort or another. Did I miss something?

Laforet 9y ago
There is no guarantee you'd win in court, especially if your domain is seized by a state level actor. This is why I think private keys combined with some kind of immutable log (cough...blockchain...cough) are far better as identity tokens than anything based on DNS.
- subway 9y ago
  Identity tokens only implement the underlying address space. Friendly identifiers either have to be immutable (read:nearly worthless), or handled by some form of registry. First come, first served registey with some form of expiry implemented via smart contracts might be possible, but it seems unlikely any one registry would ever become 'the canonical registry', as that just puts is back in the same situation as DNS. This is a hard problem to solve without asking folks with big sticks/guns to enforce policy decisions.
  - Laforet 9y ago
    I am not sure if there has to be a "canonical" registry. For example, most western countries have multiple competing credit rating agencies reporting on individual identities and the system seems to work okay on that aspect. I will give my ideas more thought down the road. We have already tried this with PGP but it had too many issues to be practical. In any case, whatever we end up building is going to be better than DNS which is one entity with too many pairs of hands controlling it, all the way from ICANN to the registries to malicious social engineers.
  - hosh 9y ago
    Juan Benet of Protocol Labs was talking about how naming things is really a consensus problem (ep 15 on the Y Combinator podcast)

pdonis 9y ago

You own your domain name in the same sense that you own any property in a society where governments have overwhelming force at their disposal. Yes, if the government really, really wants to take your ownership away, they can. But it's still a lot harder and a lot rarer than having ISPs screw over their customers.

PhasmaFelis 9y ago
> You own your domain name in the same sense that you own any property in a society where governments have overwhelming force at their disposal. You might as well say "...in any society." If a government doesn't claim a monopoly on violence, someone else will.
- dragonwriter 9y ago
  > You might as well say "...in any society." If a government doesn't claim a monopoly on violence, someone else will. Whichever entity (even if nominally a collection of entities considered together) has (whether or not it claims) a monopoly on the legitimate use of force is the government, whatever it calls itself.
  - PhasmaFelis 9y ago
    That's pretty much the point I was trying to make. A society without a government that monopolizes force can't really exist, or at least not for long.
    - mtgx 9y ago
      I think you've just crushed a lot of libertarian dreams. But you're right. If there is no official and relatively accountable government, it would be just some war lord of some other type of bully taking over and demanding their own "tax" to let you be in any given area.
    - pdonis 9y ago
      > A society without a government that monopolizes force can't really exist, or at least not for long. This is falsified by many historical examples. I gave one upthread (some of the American colonies, such as Pennsylvania in the early 1700s). Another would be saga period Iceland, which existed for several centuries with no government that monopolized force. I think history does show that societies without a government that monopolizes force are vulnerable to a failure mode which basically consists of an outside entity being willing to invest enough resources to overwhelm the force available within the society, and thus establishing a government by takeover. This is what happened in both of the examples I gave above (Iceland was taken over by the King of Norway, and Pennsylvania ended up caught up in the general tightening of everything when the British decided to get tough on the colonies after the French and Indian War). In other words, any time a group of people try to set up for themselves a place where they can live the way they want to, interfering with no one else and with no one else interfering with them, it doesn't last; someone else always ends up coming in and taking over and trying to tell them what to do. I view this as a bug, not a feature.