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posted by cmn32480 on Monday October 09 2017, @08:38PM   Printer-friendly
from the why-check-the-file-system? dept.

In an effort to block Amazon from getting the top-level domain .amazon, Brazil may have put governments on a crash course with the private sector over control of the web.

In an aggressive and contradictory letter [PDF] on Wednesday to the overseer of the internet's domain name system, ICANN, Brazilian technology minister Benedicto Filho insisted the US non-profit not approve the creation of .amazon, and states strongly that governments have the final say on what should appear online.

As you may well know, Brazil is particularly enamored with the word Amazon, being the home of the Amazon Jungle. And it doesn't want some moneybags American retailer nabbing the top-level domain for the rainforest.

"It is the right and duty of governments – and not of Amazon the company, nor any panel constituted by three nationals of a single country in their individual capacity, nor even of the ICANN Board of Directors – to identify the public policy issues that may justify the Board to adopt certain decisions," Filho said.

He goes on to say that if ICANN was "required to substitute the views of governments and the GAC [Governmental Advisory Committee] for its own judgments ... it would be dealing a fatal blow to the multi-stakeholder governance model upon which ICANN is based."

In essence, Brazil says that unless ICANN does what it says – in this case not allow for the creation of the .amazon top-level domain for Jeff Bezos' Amazon – then the entire model of internet governance that the organization represents, where all parties including governments, the technical community and business have an equal say, is invalid.

That extraordinary contradiction – that an equitable decision-making process only exists so long as governments have the final say – is not the only one in the letter.

Filho goes on to insist that all governments agree with Brazil and Peru's position that .amazon not be added to the internet, but in making his case only cites meetings held in Brazil by Brazilian interests.

https://www.theregister.co.uk/2017/09/27/brazil_dot_amazon_gtld/


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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday October 10 2017, @01:16PM (3 children)

    by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday October 10 2017, @01:16PM (#579754)

    It was implicit that there would be a system of consensus. That consensus is the only reason that decentralization is now viable for so many things. I mean fundamentally all Bitcoin is is a public append-only ledger. The thing that makes it valuable, and makes it work, is consensus. It also works conveniently with something like a DNS since you would also need a proof of work, or otherwise constraining limit, to ensure that somebody could not just arbitrarily and autonomously claim unreasonably large amounts of domains.

  • (Score: 2) by TheRaven on Tuesday October 10 2017, @01:28PM (2 children)

    by TheRaven (270) on Tuesday October 10 2017, @01:28PM (#579761) Journal

    It was implicit that there would be a system of consensus. That consensus is the only reason that decentralization is now viable for so many things.

    Consensus protocols are some of the most complex parts of networking and generally work on a small scale. Large-scale consensus protocols don't really exist yet.

    I mean fundamentally all Bitcoin is is a public append-only ledger

    A bitcoin-like blockchain-based DNS replacement would mean that anyone with enough processing power could register any names that they wanted. You can bet that companies like Amazon and Google would burn cycles getting every common combination or permutation of English words. If this pushes the price up, then it does so disproportionately for the people who want to register a single domain for the first time and don't have access to all of the spare cycles on a cloud provider.

    --
    sudo mod me up
    • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday October 10 2017, @05:21PM (1 child)

      by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday October 10 2017, @05:21PM (#579904)

      Bitcoin is precisely a large scale consensus protocol. As for the names, you would not mine directly for domain names. Instead you would mine for the right to register a name (or names depending on the specifics of implementation). This right could then be traded until somebody chose to 'cash it in' and use it to register any name that had not yet been chosen. This would both ensure that there is an incentive for miners and also ensure that anybody who wanted to register a domain name would be able to do so with minimal effort. After a brief bit of insanity, the price of domain registrations would reach an equilibrium that I imagine would be negligible. Unlike bitcoin, it would be an inflationary system - in that 'coins' that are mined would intentionally be made to be worth less over time since the rate of registrations would likely fall of exponentially whereas the rate of production would remain constant.

      I don't agree with Amazon or Google deciding to randomly register every name they can imagine. I have no doubt Chinese miners would, however. And I don't see it as a problem. Our current system literally forces people to give up their rights to larger players. The reason you associate 'clean' domain names with big companies today is largely because those companies can force individuals to give up domain names via ICANN's Uniform Domain Name Dispute Resolution Policy or various 'cybersquatting laws.' These things sound good on paper but what they translate into reality is if a big corporation wants a domain name, they get it. Everybody else? Too bad. I believe this is rather less than a desirable system.

      In reality the only real change would be that corporations would be held to the same rules as everybody else. And consequently, if they were unable or unwilling to obtain their domains fairly, they'd be left to resort to alternatives. Instead of visiting "Microsoft" you might visit "Microsoft Inc" or some such derivative. And it would be so normal that you would not even notice, much like today when you're finding ever new companies with bizarre names (largely because of domain squatting) or simply going in for alternatives such as registering on different top level domains like .co. It's not a big deal.

      • (Score: 2) by TheRaven on Wednesday October 11 2017, @04:03PM

        by TheRaven (270) on Wednesday October 11 2017, @04:03PM (#580534) Journal

        Bitcoin is precisely a large scale consensus protocol

        But not a scalable one. First, there are known vulnerabilities where someone with control over 50% of the total CPU time can take control over the entire network (and theoretical attacks that require less than this). Second, the CPU cost of each transaction rate on Bitcoin increases over time such that, even with huge amounts of custom silicon thrown at it, the network can only handle about 7 transactions per second.

        If such a system were easy to build, then we'd be using one for at least some of the other problems that involve defining global namespaces.

        --
        sudo mod me up