World Wide Web and Hypertext Markup Language (HTML) inventor Tim Berners-Lee says that if he is building a domain name service (DNS) today, he will make it “more decentralized.”
Speaking In the Eth Prague on stage next to Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Blerin, Berners-Lee reflects early Internet architecture decisions.
“If I could go back (…) I would make it more decentralized,” he said.
The DNS was invented in 1983 by Paul Mockapetris, which replaced the previous host.txt file -based file with a scalable, distributed system for naming IP addresses. However, while Berners-Lee is not personally responsible for DNS development, he may choose a URL structure that is not tied to the DNS we know today, or he may push for a decentralized alternative.
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Centralization of DNS
The DNS system is highly centralized, especially at the leading levels of the hierarchy. The root zone, which manages top-level domains such as .com and .org, are managed by US-based nonprofit Internet Corporation for designated names and numbers (icann).
Moreover, the most powerful servers are operated by a number of organizations, which further centralized the system. It allows for easy censorship and control of governments that can unilaterally occupy or hinder domain names.
This level of centralization also produces outages due to centralized service interference more likely. The control of root zones and domain policies is also concentrated in some regions and belongs to a selected group of stakeholders.
There are also concerns around privacy because centralized queries in DNS can be monitored, swollen and blocked by Internet service providers and other mediators.
Related: The community is divided into the Ens petition against uncontrollable domain patents
Crypto’s solution to the problem
Decentralized alternatives to the DNS system have been developed. The most prominent of these is the Ethereum Name Service (Ens), which maps of human names read in Ethereum addresses, contained in the Inter-Planetary File System (IPFS), or other data.
Another alternative is uncontrollable domains. Its system is domains of mints as non -fungible tokens (NFT) in Ethereum and polygon.
The Ens saw a fair portion of the adoption. In the late 2024, Ens Labs also cooperated with Paypal and Venmo, which sparks the speculation about how this cooperation likely to boost mainstream adoption.
IPFs run on Ethereum Smart contracts and aim to become user-owned and resistant to censorship. Currently, it is primarily used in web3 applications, purses and decentralized websites.
Another alternative is the handshake (HNS), which aims to be a decentralized and unauthorized naming protocol that is compatible with traditional DNS. Another project with a similar purpose is Namecoin (NMC), an early fork of Bitcoin specifically designed to offer .Bit domains and store DNS notes onchain with censorship resistance.
The IPFS is also accompanied by its own inter-platary name system (IPNS), which allows mutable naming for IPFS addresses (hashes). URLs generated in this way point to specific content, not servers.
A non-crypto alternative to DNS is openic. This is a user-run project that offers non-Icann domains, aimed at decentralizing control through community management.
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