On November 9 – 14, Istanbul will host ICANN 81 Annual General Meeting, the corporation’s final meeting this year. On October 28-31, several preliminary online meetings were held. One of them was dedicated to blockchain domain technology. Two meetings in the ICANN 81 program are dedicated to it which proves the importance of the topic.
Paul Hoffman, a leading engineer at ICANN, presented his report at the online meeting. It is well-known that ICANN is quite wary about blockchain domain name systems. However, Hoffman's speech was extremely objective and devoid of critical pathos. He only gave a general technical description of blockchain and blockchain domain technologies and highlighted the difficulties that stand in the way of their development and interaction with the DNS system, the main one being the number of blockchain systems, which is very high. In addition, new ones are constantly emerging, and the existing ones undergo changes which are sometimes drastical. Today, Ethereum Name System (ENS) is the most popular alternative domain name system, but ICANN believes there already are five to ten blockchain systems which have introduced or are about to introduce their alternative domain systems. The number can grow in the near future.
Meanwhile, some blockchain domain system operators have already announced they are going to bit for traditional gTLDs during the next stage of ICANN’s new domain program. This raises the question of integrating alternative and DNS domains, but the principles have not yet been formulated. First of all, it is necessary to solve security issues, which lie deeper than just the confusion that can be caused by regular and blockchain domains with the same name existing at the same time. Any integration is fraught with a drop in the level of security. Paul Hoffman stressed that this is not a claim against blockchain domains, but a principle that applies to any internet technologies. Thus, even the integration of two reliable and secure email systems inevitably leads to a decrease in the level of security.
Numerous technical issues also require solution. For example, resolvers in different blockchain domain name systems process requests in different ways. Finally, there are legal issues. For example, some blockchain systems have mechanisms to counteract the abuse of domain names, while others don’t, and some are even proud that they have no mechanisms of this kind: they believe this shows their adherence to the freedom of speech.
All of these problems will be the focus of the discussion during the two ICANN 81 meetings. Paul Hoffman said that sometime ago ICANN published two documents it had developed at its website. The first describes the general technical principles of blockchain systems functioning, and the second is devoted directly to blockchain domains. Hoffman encouraged all interested community members to review these documents to be better prepared for upcoming discussions.
