Re: [Help-gnunet] GNS future

[Christian Grothoff]

On 1/28/19 8:01 PM, Alexandre Garreau wrote:
> On 2019-01-28 at 18:41, Christian Grothoff wrote:
> 
>     On 1/28/19 12:17 PM, Alexandre Garreau wrote:
> 
>         What about graph- rather than tree(hierarchy)-based reference
>         system? for instance if I want galex.eu, galex.fr, galex.it, to
>         point to the same thing, how might that be used (I had
>         difficulty formulating this question since the first time I
>         learnt about GNS, in 2013)? Would there be some anti-redundance
>         system to ensure for instance org.eu and eu.org point to the
>         same thing (because otherwise keeping the distinction between
>         stuff.fr.eu.org and stuff.eu.org.fr might be a problem)?
> 
>     Why shouldn't you be able to point galex.eu and galex.fr to exactly
>     the same zone? Many companies do effectively this with all of their
>     FOO.cc-DNS entries. GNS is graph-based, not tree-based, you can have
>     cycles and whatever else, and there is no unique root (other than
>     what might be common consensus / default settings). So maybe I'm not
>     understanding the question ;-)
> 
> Yes it is. Yet two things: I feel like most companies (at least it’s the
> case for France), instead of making DNS entries synonymous, decide one
> is “principal”, and make all the others —which seem to be here only to
> prevent cybersquatting— redirect on it.

Well, in GNS the principal is always your public key. Everything is a
redirection to it. And if you're a global brand, you can obviously try
to have every domain redirect to you (brand.garreau, brand.grothoff,
brand.eu -- everything. So you become brand.foo.bar.baz or whatever).
And ideally, everybody puts your brand into their TLD table, then you're
just "brand." (the last "." here is for the root in FQDN notation).

> The biggest, second thing: having a .fr won’t automatically give you a
> .eu, nor having a .eu.org give you a .org.eu, and I find this
> unergonomic and confusing. It would be really cool to have some
> coordination among TLDs to make this possible.

Global consensus is not something GNS will help you with. Instead, you'd
have to literally convince every domain owner (by whatever means,
including possibly payment) to add the redirection.

> But since it makes more money —as I guess ICANN and some registrars
> don’t necessarily yet make subsequently more money with CAs and DNSSEC—
> to ask each company to pay for each name separately, and to make
> cybersquatting a competition-based problem in which you must invest
> against risk, rather than applying real concrete solutions that work for
> everybody, maybe that couldn’t currently happen.
> 
> Which makes me think to something else I forgot to mention: currently
> naming is only FCFS and company/state-ruled, and inconsistently
> (sometimes even weakly) enforced against certains semantics. .net is no
> longer for ISPs (or anything more broadly network related), .com is no
> longer purely commercial, etc. for .org, .info… not talking of poor gTLD
> shared only for puns or cheap names. Lot of stuff is not enforced.
> 
> Some are and it is great the companies behind work on it. But if current
> TLD integrate *directly* into GNS, will there be something more simple,
> long and in the end complicated (like the fr.afnic.gnu and
> afnic.icann.gnu I saw), or more complex: would there be a way to make
> users participate in enforcing naming semantics (for instance by
> deciding .eu is EURID thing, and then users can override it, as well as
> for most geographic and generic TLD), so that to make override these
> common TLD so to make these substitutions/synonyms possible (or maybe at
> least only for undefined names)? or use some sort of substitution lists?
> that could be shared? with one that would make the main gTLD synonyms
> (for geographical inclusion, such as .fr in .eu, etc.) and generic ones
> (so that the order becomes irrelevant and .org.eu is a synonym for
> .eu.org).
> 
> Maybe even one day something will be able to hook in a registrar and
> alternatively buy these cheaper automatically…

GNS doesn't change the situation with registrars. You can still have
them, they may still have policies, those policies may be effectively
enforced, or not. We can have "well-known" registrars (say AFNIC for
'.fr' if most of the world agrees for AFNIC to continue to manage
'.fr'), and obscure ones (".garreau", ".grothoff", etc.) that hardly
anyone has in their TLD table and that you usually reach by other means
(.garreau.fr).  But that's then a matter of being widely
known/recognized, a popularity context that each user can literally
influence, not something centrally moderated (modulo default shipped
with the software).