The inventor of World Wide Web and Hypertext Markup (HTML), Tim Berners-Lee, said that if he was constructing a site name service (DNS) today, he would make it “decentralized”.
Berners-Lee spoke along with the co-founder of ETH Prague on the stage alongside Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin about early web architecture decisions.
“If I could return […] I might make it more decentralized, ”he said.
DNS was invented in 1983 by Paul Mockapetris and replaced the previous Hosts.txt-based system with a scalable, distributed system for naming IP addresses. While Berners-Lee was not personally answerable for the DNS development, he could have opted for a URL structure that was not sure to the DNS we all know today, or he could have pushed for a decentralized alternative.
Source: mely.eth
Centralization of the DNS
The DNS system is strongly centralized, especially on the highest hierarchy levels. The root zone, the highest level domains comparable to .com and .org rules, is managed by the non-profit web corporation for assigned names and numbers (ICANN).
In addition, essentially the most relevant servers are operated by a handful of organizations, which continues to centralize the system. This enables easy censorship and control by governments that may unilaterally confiscate or block domains.
This degree of centralization also makes failures more likely attributable to a centralized service disorder. Control over root zones and domain guidelines also concentrated in some regions and under a particular group of stakeholders.
There are also concerns about privacy, since centralized DNS queries from Internet service providers and other intermediaries could be monitored, recorded and intercepted.
Crypto's solution for the issue
Decentralized alternatives to the DNS system are developed. The best known is the Ethereum Name Service (ENS), the human-readable name on Ethereum addresses, content of the interplanetary file system (IPFS) or other data.
Another alternative are unstoppable domains. His system reduces domains as non-fungal tokens (NFTS) on Ethereum and Polygon.
ENS has seen an adequate application for adoption. At the tip of 2024, ENS laboratories also worked with PayPal and Venmo to trigger speculation about how this partnership probably increases the mainstream adoption.
IPFS runs with Smart Contracts from Ethereum and goals to be user -owned and resistant. It is currently mainly utilized in web3 applications, items and decentralized web sites.
Another alternative is Handshake (HNS), which is alleged to be a decentralized and friendly approval of the name protocol mentioned, which is compatible with traditional DNS. A project with an identical goal is NameCoin (NMC), an early Bitcoin fork that was specially developed for the bit domains and the memory of DNS recordings on the censor resistance.
IPFS can also be accompanied by its own interplanetary name system (IPNS), which enables the mutable name for IPFS addresses (Hashes). In this manner, URLS indicates certain content, to not server.
A non-crypto alternative to DNS is open. This is a user-conducted project that provides non-Icann domains that aim to decentralize control by community governance.
