5 ms·

This is one of those situations that really encapsulates the essence of IP for me: There is something virtual (the .org tld) that comes with legally enforced sc

by m12k 7y ago

This is one of those situations that really encapsulates the essence of IP for me: There is something virtual (the .org tld) that comes with legally enforced scarcity and a monopoly that governs it. And some guys realize that you can acquire this monopoly cheaply, and milk it for massive profit, at the expense of millions of people. It's not even like there's some investment that needs to be done, some new fancy tech around tld's that need to be funded - it's just a plain as day money-grab, rent-seeking in its most obvious form.

swiley 7y ago
My understanding is that running resolvers at the kind of scale they need to handle attacks is actually difficult and expensive. The registries themselves are just a couple of machines with databases on them. Maintaining namespaces is just hard and the DNS, with groups of people running TLDs, is the best we’ve come up with so far. I personally thought namecoin was a creative alternative and I’m a little disappointed it hasn’t become more popular but until something like that does we’re going to continue seeing things like this.
- dmos62 7y ago
  > DNS, with groups of people running TLDs, is the best we’ve come up with so far. Is it? I'm not very familiar with the domain, so I'm actually asking. Generally, I'm very cautious when someone says that current state of affairs is the best we have come up with, because it doesn't acknowledge the inertia to keep things as they are.
  - dangerface 7y ago
    No, there are properly decentralised domain name projects like namecoin which uses blockchain to control ownership of domains and zone edits in a more secure way. There are a few other projects that decentralise domains and fix security issues, but our current federated system has become a heavily established billion dollar industry and the people in control of it have no incentive to give up that control. Any move to a new system will have to come from end users who don't know there are issues, and don't care enough to spend the effort understanding the issue and solution.
    - DonHopkins 7y ago
      As if a den of evangelical blockchain shills would run the domain name system any more ethically, responsibly, and transparently than the current bunch of old school shysters running it, if only they'd hand over the reigns of control to the new blockchain shysters and make them God. Slapping the "blockchain" buzzword on everything doesn't solve any problems, it just makes you look like yet another con-man. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Namecoin https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Namecoin >A 2015 study found that of the 120,000 domain names registered on Namecoin, only 28 were in use. An empirical study of Namecoin and lessons for decentralized namespace design http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.698.4605&rep=rep1&type=pdf http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.698... >Based on all the empirical evidence we present, we are left to conclude that the Namecoin ecosystem is dysfunctional. The vast majority of registered names represent squatting and there is little evidence of a secondary market for names. While there could be many factors that explain the lack of adoption, there appears to be clear room for improvements in the design to minimize squatting and other problems. To this end, in Section 6, we explore the design space of decentralized namespaces and make recommendations. Why Namecoin Didn't Take Off: A Cautionary Tale https://cointelegraph.com/news/why-namecoin-didnt-take-off-a-cautionary-tale https://cointelegraph.com/news/why-namecoin-didnt-take-off-a... >Cointelegraph: You used to be one of Namecoin's biggest cheerleaders. What happened? >Michael Dean: So here's my opinion, which is really going to get me hated, but I think Namecoin as a decentralized DNS-type system is dead. >[...] The biggest flaw is the clunky wallet that takes ten minutes to open. The other biggest flaw is that the near-zero expense of registering domains encouraged domain squatting. All the good names are taken. Someone registered every noun in the dictionary as Dot-Bit. >And these squatters didn't even do it right. When you go to any of these squatted domains, they don't go to a place holder with a page that says "to buy your site in Dot-Bit, email me here and make me an offer." The sites just don't resolve! These people are unclear on the semi-scummy concept of domain squatting. In Namecoin, even that gets done wrong! >Also, Dot-Bit is actually vulnerable to a hostile takeover from ICANN. If ICANN decided to support Dot-Bit and decide where things would resolve contrary to where the Namecoin wallet was resolving things, and corporate DNS servers sided with the ICANN (which they largely would), it would create consumer confidence chaos with the Namecoin system.
- lifty 7y ago
  Handshake (https://handshake.org/ https://handshake.org/) is another attempt at a decentralized domain name system. It’s compatible with the old system so I’m more hopeful that it can gain some adoption. Let’s see.
- Felz 7y ago
  To be clear, the previous owners of .org didn't actually do the technical parts of running their TLD, they subcontracted it out: https://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/bi6gg5/help_keep_domain_prices_in_check/elz94i7/?context=3 https://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/bi6gg5/help_ke...
- oarsinsync 7y ago
  The cost of running this infrastructure doesn't go up or down with each additional domain name registered.
  - sokoloff 7y ago
    Surely resolvers for a TLD with 100K domains and 1MM lookups per day are cheaper to run than those with 100MM domains and 1BB lookups per day. It may not have an obvious change with a single new domain registered, but surely there are significant variable costs. (To be clear, I oppose this transaction, just not on the grounds that root name servers are all fixed costs.)
    - oarsinsync 7y ago
      > Surely resolvers for a TLD with 100K domains and 1MM lookups per day are cheaper to run than those with 100MM domains and 1BB lookups per day. This on the face of it sounds reasonable, but the cost difference is likely marginal. If you're going to provide a highly available DDoS resistant infrastructure to deal with a large scale of customers, the majority of the costs are going to come from building that distributed infrastructure across many parts of the world. The costs may go up between 1 million lookups vs 1 billion lookups, but if there is an increase, the order of increase will be closer to 10x than it is 1000x.
      - CydeWeys 7y ago
        Can confirm. Our TLDs scaled by about two orders of magnitude in total registration number following our launch of .app, but the associated costs that rose were very marginal. Most of the cost is not strictly related to volume.
    - jlokier 7y ago
      The increase in cost is sufficiently sub-linear that the cost of each new .org registration should be going down as the number of them goes up, if it was truly run for public benefit while breaking even. As another comment says, most of the cost will be in building and maintaining a robust, scalable, attack-resistant distributed system. The linear scaling costs (such as bandwidth and processors) will be small in comparison. (Of course at much higher numbers, mathematically O(N) starts to dominate again, but 1 billion lookups per day isn't enough for that.)
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]

by m12k 7y ago

swiley 7y ago

My understanding is that running resolvers at the kind of scale they need to handle attacks is actually difficult and expensive. The registries themselves are just a couple of machines with databases on them. Maintaining namespaces is just hard and the DNS, with groups of people running TLDs, is the best we’ve come up with so far. I personally thought namecoin was a creative alternative and I’m a little disappointed it hasn’t become more popular but until something like that does we’re going to continue seeing things like this.

dmos62 7y ago
> DNS, with groups of people running TLDs, is the best we’ve come up with so far. Is it? I'm not very familiar with the domain, so I'm actually asking. Generally, I'm very cautious when someone says that current state of affairs is the best we have come up with, because it doesn't acknowledge the inertia to keep things as they are.
- dangerface 7y ago
  No, there are properly decentralised domain name projects like namecoin which uses blockchain to control ownership of domains and zone edits in a more secure way. There are a few other projects that decentralise domains and fix security issues, but our current federated system has become a heavily established billion dollar industry and the people in control of it have no incentive to give up that control. Any move to a new system will have to come from end users who don't know there are issues, and don't care enough to spend the effort understanding the issue and solution.
  - DonHopkins 7y ago
    As if a den of evangelical blockchain shills would run the domain name system any more ethically, responsibly, and transparently than the current bunch of old school shysters running it, if only they'd hand over the reigns of control to the new blockchain shysters and make them God. Slapping the "blockchain" buzzword on everything doesn't solve any problems, it just makes you look like yet another con-man. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Namecoin https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Namecoin >A 2015 study found that of the 120,000 domain names registered on Namecoin, only 28 were in use. An empirical study of Namecoin and lessons for decentralized namespace design http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.698.4605&rep=rep1&type=pdf http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.698... >Based on all the empirical evidence we present, we are left to conclude that the Namecoin ecosystem is dysfunctional. The vast majority of registered names represent squatting and there is little evidence of a secondary market for names. While there could be many factors that explain the lack of adoption, there appears to be clear room for improvements in the design to minimize squatting and other problems. To this end, in Section 6, we explore the design space of decentralized namespaces and make recommendations. Why Namecoin Didn't Take Off: A Cautionary Tale https://cointelegraph.com/news/why-namecoin-didnt-take-off-a-cautionary-tale https://cointelegraph.com/news/why-namecoin-didnt-take-off-a... >Cointelegraph: You used to be one of Namecoin's biggest cheerleaders. What happened? >Michael Dean: So here's my opinion, which is really going to get me hated, but I think Namecoin as a decentralized DNS-type system is dead. >[...] The biggest flaw is the clunky wallet that takes ten minutes to open. The other biggest flaw is that the near-zero expense of registering domains encouraged domain squatting. All the good names are taken. Someone registered every noun in the dictionary as Dot-Bit. >And these squatters didn't even do it right. When you go to any of these squatted domains, they don't go to a place holder with a page that says "to buy your site in Dot-Bit, email me here and make me an offer." The sites just don't resolve! These people are unclear on the semi-scummy concept of domain squatting. In Namecoin, even that gets done wrong! >Also, Dot-Bit is actually vulnerable to a hostile takeover from ICANN. If ICANN decided to support Dot-Bit and decide where things would resolve contrary to where the Namecoin wallet was resolving things, and corporate DNS servers sided with the ICANN (which they largely would), it would create consumer confidence chaos with the Namecoin system.
lifty 7y ago
Handshake (https://handshake.org/ https://handshake.org/) is another attempt at a decentralized domain name system. It’s compatible with the old system so I’m more hopeful that it can gain some adoption. Let’s see.
Felz 7y ago
To be clear, the previous owners of .org didn't actually do the technical parts of running their TLD, they subcontracted it out: https://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/bi6gg5/help_keep_domain_prices_in_check/elz94i7/?context=3 https://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/bi6gg5/help_ke...
oarsinsync 7y ago
The cost of running this infrastructure doesn't go up or down with each additional domain name registered.
- sokoloff 7y ago
  Surely resolvers for a TLD with 100K domains and 1MM lookups per day are cheaper to run than those with 100MM domains and 1BB lookups per day. It may not have an obvious change with a single new domain registered, but surely there are significant variable costs. (To be clear, I oppose this transaction, just not on the grounds that root name servers are all fixed costs.)
  - oarsinsync 7y ago
    > Surely resolvers for a TLD with 100K domains and 1MM lookups per day are cheaper to run than those with 100MM domains and 1BB lookups per day. This on the face of it sounds reasonable, but the cost difference is likely marginal. If you're going to provide a highly available DDoS resistant infrastructure to deal with a large scale of customers, the majority of the costs are going to come from building that distributed infrastructure across many parts of the world. The costs may go up between 1 million lookups vs 1 billion lookups, but if there is an increase, the order of increase will be closer to 10x than it is 1000x.
    - CydeWeys 7y ago
      Can confirm. Our TLDs scaled by about two orders of magnitude in total registration number following our launch of .app, but the associated costs that rose were very marginal. Most of the cost is not strictly related to volume.
  - jlokier 7y ago
    The increase in cost is sufficiently sub-linear that the cost of each new .org registration should be going down as the number of them goes up, if it was truly run for public benefit while breaking even. As another comment says, most of the cost will be in building and maintaining a robust, scalable, attack-resistant distributed system. The linear scaling costs (such as bandwidth and processors) will be small in comparison. (Of course at much higher numbers, mathematically O(N) starts to dominate again, but 1 billion lookups per day isn't enough for that.)

deleted 7y ago

[deleted]