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Why are top level domains so restricted?
(lemmy.ml)
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this post was submitted on 15 Nov 2024
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You can use whatever top level domain you want, you just have to convince everyone in the world to use your Root servers instead of ICANN, which ain't gonna happen. Tor has the .onion TLD, etc. There are no restrictions here. They're more like...agreements.
But why did everyone agree to that? Couldn't domains be determined by user, or at least a bit more decentralized? (ex: google.com leads to IP address 1.1.1.1)
How is the internet supposed to work if we don't agree on where every site goes? How are you supposed to decentralize a central agreement?
I meant more like did it have to be a central agreement for it to scale up to what it is now?
There's nothing to scale. DNS servers are just an address book. There's only 200 million entries active and visited. 1.1b entries otherwise, which; for a computer isn't a lot.
DNS servers replicate down-stream, and the root servers maintain authority. A local SQLite file could handle this easily, and you could always run your own DNS server locally if you wanted to. But there has to be a central authority.
DNS isn't just an address book, it determines ownership. So in a decentralized system I could just spin up some servers that direct anyone in my area trying to reach PayPal to my IP instead.
Insanely, this is kind of how IP addresses are assigned using bgp.