A move to decentralized allocation of .com would be most successful if managed via an "airdrop" to current .com holders, if there was wide industry support.
"Airdrop to current .com holders" is a technical problem. I think I have a solution.
For this, I'll refer to "domains," "legacy domains" or "legacy DNS" as the mainstream technology most internet users currently use,
and "cryptomains" as the domains of some DNS replacement cryptocoin technology that attempts to airdrop to legacy
DNS domain owners.
So the goal is to give all (or almost all) legacy domain holders an airdrop of the corresponding cryptomain. You need two things:
(1) An "inherited set" consisting of some big set of legacy domains, so they can't be registered unless you prove you own the legacy domain.
(2) Some way for current domain holders to prove their ownership and ("claiming your inheritance.")
To seed the inherited set before the genesis block:
- Obtain a list of domain names. Common crawl [1] seems to be not under NDA, although it's hosted by a proprietary vendor (AWS).
Will probably need prefunding (in USD) to pay for AWS nodes to walk the data and extract domain names.
- Common crawl data is ~100TB, but most of that is content. Verisign official .com database appears to be about ~2 GB [2]. So the per-node storage requirements for an airdrop to all existing .com domains would be reasonable.
- The base list is called the "crawl set." This covers domains everybody knows about. So google, yahoo, facebook, reddit, etc. will surely be included.
No humans make decisions about what does or doesn't make the cut, and nobody at those companies has to be convinced to do anything special. Most organizations
that people actually care about will be included.
After the genesis block, the inherited set can be grown as follows:
- Any registered TITAN account can submit, for free, up to ~8 domains every ~24 hours, which will considered by the network for inclusion. This makes up the "ping set."
- ~20 randomly selected delegates will ping each domain in the ping-set over ~60-day period by doing a DNS lookup (in legacy DNS) and seeing if it resolves. We check the signature on the ping,
and check that the delegate was the one randomly selected by the random process. But the DNS lookup itself is not audited, because we don't want to DDOS anybody! We just take the delegate's
word for whether the domain worked or not.
- If >50% of the pings agree that the domain appears to exist, the domain is moved from the ping set to the launch set.
- Pings are initiated by ordinary users to make sure domains aren't inadvertently excluded.
- We may have a browser extension or DNS proxy, to aid in gathering domain names.
- ~8 months after launch, new pings can no longer be submitted.
- ~10 months after launch, the last pings are resolved and the inherited set is now fixed for eternity.
If you register a cryptomain, the process goes like follows:
- If the cryptomain is not in the inherited set, great! You got your shiny new cryptomain.
- If you register a cryptomain in the inherited set, the registration will be ineffective until you prove ownership of the legacy domain.
- If your previously registered cryptomain gets at least 5 pings, with >50% success rate, at any point in time, the cryptomain will be suspended until either unsuccessful ping(s) bring the rate
below 50%, or you prove ownership of the legacy domain.
You can prove ownership of the legacy domain by entering (the hash of) your account's public key in a TXT record in legacy DNS, and using that public key to pay a fee to the network. ~200
randomly selected delegates check that the TXT record exists and contains the correct key over a ~60 day period. If at least 20 such checks have been performed with greater than 90% success,
then you have successfully proven ownership of the legacy domain.
So basically:
- Holders of domains that were crawlable at the Common Crawl used to initialize the genesis block will have their domain reserved in the inherited set.
- Holders of domains that got / became popular enough that at least one user submitted them during ~8 months post-genesis will have their domain reserved in the inherited set.
- If you register a new cryptomain during the first ~8 months, you need to control the corresponding legacy domain to ensure the cryptomain won't be suspended.
The owners of ".com" would not want to give up their control and influence for nothing so they would have to be allocated a large stake in the new system. But getting a government to agree to this is like getting the voting dac adopted by governments.
The beauty of an airdrop is that neither the ICANN administrators, nor the domain holders, need to consent ahead of time. They're simply given a stake in the system that they can claim at anytime.
[1]
http://commoncrawl.org/[2]
http://www.leandomainsearch.com/blog/16-how-to-get-access-to-the-official-verisign--com-zone-file