I don’t really think ICANN should be based anywhere or really have any say, or I guess even exist at all. I’m a strong believer in a decentralized DNS system not controlled or designated by a single, all powerful entity. With how important it is and how much breaks if it gets compromised either by outside forces, or by internal corruption, it makes sense that something like this shouldn’t be so centralized and vulnerable.

Who says they need to go that far? One can build alternate DNS systems without self-isolating, in fact they should. Air-gapping like you suggest is extra work and not necessary to implement new domain registration control and DNS root servers. Also it kind of defeats the point because it isn’t a stand against IANA it’s saying build your own internet, not take back the one we already have.

So it’s basically because of laziness or lack of effort that no one wants anything better, or even just different. And that means ICANN/IANA can just casually break countless internet domains and cause a decade of internet bitrot at the drop of a hat and no one will challenge them over it.

By “release the kracken .io” I’m saying make it open for general use that is not country specific. We already have tons of domains, I see no reason why this has to be retired.

Yep. And for very good reasons, as explained in the article. But knowing that domains can be a significant source of income for a small nation, it does seem a shame to both waste that resource and break tons of sites in the process. I wish there were better ways to do this that didn’t mean shutting it down or even selling it off to the highest bidder (who already has enough money).

Any sources for further reading/watching?

So the .su domain was handed to Russia to operate alongside its own (.ru). The Russian government agreed that it would eventually be shut down, but no clear rules around its governance or when that should happen were defined.

But ambiguity is the worst thing for a top-level domain. Unknowingly, this decision created an environment in which .su became a digital wild west. Today, it is a barely policed top-level domain, a plausibly deniable home for Russian dark ops and a place where supremacist content and cyber-crime have found cover.

I seems IANA would like to not repeat past mistakes.

Yes but it’s unregulated and like most unregulated TLDs it has become a cesspool of malware and dark dealings. I don’t think anybody would never if that were to happen to .io.

Well, if you want my version, centralized DNS and centralized PKI reliant on bureaucracy are all wrong.

Identity providers should be a thing, and under one identity provider there should be ability to fix whatever domain name one wants, the act confirmed with cryptography. The providers themselves should technically be identified only by their public keys, and those should be listed in directories similar to yellow pages, changing very rarely preferably, where a key is listed against provider’s company name, phone, whether it’s paid or not, etc. Such directories being shared should be the only thing centralized here.

Our world has a lot of ugly, inefficient and vulnerable systems.

But the worst part is that common gaslighting or madness or whatever, where people act along unnecessary inefficiencies they themselves don’t need, like sheep watched by a shepherd dog. It’s obvious that various trash in governments wants systems vulnerable and centralized. But that’s what only they need, and only a handful of technologies they’ve rebuilt after that need. I don’t understand why the rest build bad systems where they don’t have to and don’t need to, or eve prefer bad systems where they have good ones.

It’s similar to the question of why people subject to genocide often don’t fight for their lives, at least until it’s too late.

Well, the main thing I’ve seen it used for are old homepages and hobbyist sites with web design from year 1997.

If that’s what they mean by cybercrime they’re bigger bootlickers than I originally thought. Like it’s one thing to not want to support piracy, it’s a whole nother thing to outright say the quiet part out loud. Which, yeah that’s what they just did if that’s what they really meant. It’s already bad enough that they supposedly want domains to be aggressively policed, I mean like I said in my other comment, serious “no swearing allowed on the internet vibes” going on from how they wrote that part…

Let me introduce you to a third one ↑

? edit: oh, piracy! cool :]

I don’t know any but I’m now of the opinion that they should be reassigned to Superman.

Wouldn’t the country and domain dissolving mean it can be reassigned? I don’t understand why after that it would still be considered a country TLD only available for future countries.

Country code domains are decided by international agreement on two character abbreviations per country, and IANA needs to abide by that.

For example, can you imagine IANA caught In the middle of whether ‘.cn’ should be owned by China or Taiwan? What a disaster that would be. Their only sustainable approach is to stay out of it, and just follow what the UN says

Most people weren’t following the Chagos Islands news, and I doubt most people with .io names bothered to check any notifications here. A lot of people just pick them up and set them to auto-renew and generally don’t think about it again. Those people won’t be impacted today, but they will be once the domains get transitioned away, and it’ll be a rude awakening for a lot of people.

The simple solution is to not buy country TLDs unless you live in that country or something.