Ask HN: Custom Domains Without ICANN?

2 pointsOtternonsenz3y ago4 comments

Let me first say, I do get why ICANN has been successful in their ability to manage and administer their business (and to a lesser extent, duty) of being the authority in domains and domain name resolution.

But if all of this is built off of free and open protocols, why would I pay a company for the right to administer something I can do for free? Am I off base in my understanding of how the internet works, given not having to pay thousands of dollars to have the right to a custom name server?

If anyone can give me a technical explanation why it’s impossible to host your own nameservers or have your own custom domain, I’m genuinely curious.

It just feels like with the undercurrent of some in tech to get back to a more decentralized experience on the web, more would be done to allow for people to do what they want with the technology they have access to.

4 comments

toast03y ago

Domain names are primarily useful because of the global consensus about how to resolve a name.

Building, and maybe even running an alternative root is simple from a technical basis, but without global consensus, it's not very useful. Alternic was around for many years and didn't get anywhere near enough adoption to be useful.

If the concern is cost, some TLDs offer domains for much lower cost, some even free. There are many domain owners that offer subdomains for free too. If you have a domain for $10/year and let 1000 people have a subdomain, it's not worth billing them, etc. There's certainly a discussion available about the costs being unjustifyably high, but they're not that high in absolute terms, and lower prices would seem to encourage more hoarding.

h2odragon3y ago

You can have your own root nameserver on your network; and / or your own TLD's; or even do fun stuff where you subvert some names on your net and let "public" answers through for others.

If thats not enough there are a few "alternate roots" systems around still I think: https://icannwiki.org/Alternative_Roots

theandrewbailey3y ago

If you run your own DNS server(s) and point your network to them, there's nothing stopping you from using whatever domains you want, and ICANN can't stop you.

I'm surprised that some popular alternate DNS system hasn't emerged on the open internet yet. I think TOR comes close, but you're not in full control of the domains.

LinuxBender3y ago

If anyone can give me a technical explanation why it’s impossible to host your own nameservers or have your own custom domain, I’m genuinely curious.

Anyone may host their own name-servers. I run many of them for my various hobby domains. I can add any TLD I can think of however for someone to query my name-servers for those domains without them first manually inserting logic to query my name-servers would require the root servers to recognize that TLD and have entries for my name-servers. To get a new TLD into the root servers is not a technical problem at all. It is a governance/regulatory obstacle and very extremely non-trivial to jump through all those hoops. You asked for the technical explanation. There aren't any technical limitations to my knowledge. Technically the root server operators could add anything that conforms to the DNS RFC's.

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