Nominet chooses civil war over compromise by rejecting ex-BBC Trust chairman • Hacker News Board

Re: Nominet chooses civil war over compromise by rejecting ex-BBC Trust chairman

#31

Post by robalfonso » Tue, Apr 13, 2021, 2:28 PM UTC

southerntofu wrote: post #24

robalfonso wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Quote>>> They're half a dozen lines of text (counting glue records and DNSSEC anchors) in a database, it's OUTRAGEOUS we have to pay for that at all. This is not what you are paying for. Every time this argument comes up it hides the real problem...what you are paying for is the legal wrangling, security overhead and general compliance that comes with the internet. Phishing, trademarks, spam, business disputes,and va…

> Phishing, trademarks, spam, business disputes,and valid legal requests will all still exist no matter who runs things. Of this list, only "valid legal requests" is something a TLD should be concerned with in my opinion. And even that is questionable, given that law is often unjust, favoring the powerful and abusing the powerless. We already have strong regulations holding internet hosts accountable for what they're…

TLD's have various compliance requirements around abuse, which does include the afore mentioned. There is significant volume related to this compliance as well as ensuring registrars maintain compliance. It's the nature of the existing arrangement so it's not hypothetical.

Of course the individual cost is low for a single item, however, businesses have never operated on that principle. They aggregate the profit and the risk across a pool, no surprise here.

Re: Nominet chooses civil war over compromise by rejecting ex-BBC Trust chairman

#32

Post by southerntofu » Tue, Apr 13, 2021, 3:53 PM UTC

tzs wrote: post #30

southerntofu wrote: post #6

ICANN has failed us, Nominet has failed us, Public Interest Registry has failed us. We definitely need some better system where a single entity going rogue can't affect millions of domain owners. I can see two approaches. One is where we make it technically impossible for DNS operators higher in the tree to mess with us. That's what the GNU Name System proposes with the "hyper hyper local root", a petname system whic…

If I could I would give you 50 up votes just because you wrote 5 paragraphs about what you see as problems with the current system without suggesting that it be replaced with some kind of blockchain.

We probably need a blockchain-based commenting system to make sure you can afford 50 upvotes as long as you have enough miners running ;-)

Who cares about sybil attacks when you can run a proper ponzi scheme and get rich! /s

Re: Nominet chooses civil war over compromise by rejecting ex-BBC Trust chairman

#33

Post by southerntofu » Tue, Apr 13, 2021, 3:59 PM UTC

robalfonso wrote: post #31

southerntofu wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Phishing, trademarks, spam, business disputes,and valid legal requests will all still exist no matter who runs things. Of this list, only "valid legal requests" is something a TLD should be concerned with in my opinion. And even that is questionable, given that law is often unjust, favoring the powerful and abusing the powerless. We already have strong regulations holding internet hosts accountable for what they're…

TLD's have various compliance requirements around abuse, which does include the afore mentioned. There is significant volume related to this compliance as well as ensuring registrars maintain compliance. It's the nature of the existing arrangement so it's not hypothetical. Of course the individual cost is low for a single item, however, businesses have never operated on that principle. They aggregate the profit and t…

> Of course the individual cost is low for a single item (...) They aggregate the profit and the risk across a pool

It's not the only way ever to deal with that. We could imagine a cross-TLD insurance which would take care of legal costs, for instance. Or have for-profit entities pay the current registration price (more?) so that others can have domain names for free. Or have a donation-based model with transparent accounting so people can see whether they need to donate more money. Or crowdfunding campaigns when a specific issue arises and introduces legal costs.

I'm not saying i know the best way, i'm just saying we know for a fact the current system is only making TLD execs pocket 6-digit salaries out of a public service, and that's a scandal. If at all, they should be paid the same salary as anyone else working for the TLD. Yes, the same as even the cleaners/cooks if such things apply. This way, they'll have incentives to either make things cheaper for the rest of us, or share some of the wealth they accumulate off our backs with less-privileged folks.

Re: Nominet chooses civil war over compromise by rejecting ex-BBC Trust chairman

#34

Post by southerntofu » Tue, Apr 13, 2021, 4:18 PM UTC

marcinzm wrote: post #26

southerntofu wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>>a democratic non-profit foundation > Isn't that what Nominet basically was and here we are? Nominet was a non-profit, but not a democratic one. Democracy is not "choose your rulers", but "choose your rules". Having a board/parliament is by definition the opposite of government by/for the people. The simple fact the community has to fight against the board is proof of that. > a minimum barrier to people simply writi…

> Nominet was a non-profit, but not a democratic one. Democracy is not "choose your rulers", but "choose your rules". Having a board/parliament is by definition the opposite of government by/for the people. The simple fact the community has to fight against the board is proof of that. That's a No True Scotsman argument since by your definition there is no large scale democracy in existence. Most people would consider…

> by your definition there is no large scale democracy in existence

Take a look at Chiapas or Rojava. They are large-scale governance systems that most people would agree fit the definition of a democracy, if only because local assemblies and women's assemblies have a lot of power. They both have some forms of representation but nothing similar to what we have here in terms of accountability. You can for example watch "Viva Zapata" documentary about autonomy in Chiapas.

Also, if it hypothetically did not exist yet, would it be a reason to give another meaning to the word? If we can admit a God does not exist, should we call an AI a God because its ways are ineffable?

> Most people would consider a representative democracy to be a democracy.

In some places, most people would consider vaccines a trojan horse of the Illuminati and homosexuality to be a sin. Does the majority always have to be right? Isn't the tyranny of the majority precisely one of the problems with our pretend-democracies? To be fair, tyranny of the majority would be better than the current tyranny of the minority elite elected by the majority (of people who have a right to vote, which is not everyone) in a process that resembles more reality TV shows than a political argument.

Re: Nominet chooses civil war over compromise by rejecting ex-BBC Trust chairman

#35

Post by southerntofu » Tue, Apr 13, 2021, 4:26 PM UTC

marcinzm wrote: post #29

southerntofu wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sure, it might get worse. But it may as well get better. Implying that changing paradigm can only make things worse is a fallacy.

> Implying that changing paradigm can only make things worse is a fallacy. So is saying that changing the paradigm will make things better or stay the same. I'm not making a data driven argument for not changing things, I'm simply pointing out that you're not making one either.

No because i don't pretend i have the best solution to every problem. However, i'm convinced not doing anything is the worst possible answer.

https://ttm.sh/uzm.jpg

Re: Nominet chooses civil war over compromise by rejecting ex-BBC Trust chairman

#36

Post by southerntofu » Tue, Apr 13, 2021, 4:34 PM UTC

dooglius wrote: post #28

southerntofu wrote: post #6

ICANN has failed us, Nominet has failed us, Public Interest Registry has failed us. We definitely need some better system where a single entity going rogue can't affect millions of domain owners. I can see two approaches. One is where we make it technically impossible for DNS operators higher in the tree to mess with us. That's what the GNU Name System proposes with the "hyper hyper local root", a petname system whic…

Tor's Onion Services are pretty much ideal for this, and provides additional anti-censorship guarantees by providing anonymization for both parties.

Onion names are a very good global crypto-secure naming scheme, but they don't solve the human-meaningful part of Zooko's triangle. GNS has some similar design properties, but "solves" the triangle by tying two different naming systems: petnames for locally-meaningful/secure names, root names for global/meaningful names.

Also as good as tor's design is, it requires some level of centralization with hidden service directories, which GNS doesn't. Disclaimer: i'm a happy tor user for many years, criticism here is in good faith (posting this from the tor network).