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DNS is a criminally under discussed topic in the sovereign circles. Nobody thinks about infrastructure until it’s too late…
Anyway, I think domain names are a case of digital scarcity, just like bitcoin itself.
But since domains are fundamentally not fungible, you have another set of problems to deal on top, like squatting or pricing.
Squatting in this context means buying a desirable name early on with no intention of using it other than for speculative resell value.
There’s also the case that certain names are subjectively more valuable than others and, while a domain registrar can cook some inhouse algorithms to spit some pricing, and update it according to viral trends or whatever, it’s difficult to imagine a p2p system being able to make similar gatekeeping.
Lastly, internet domains aren’t sold, just leased, and there may be reasons for that to be a good thing other than the continued revenue stream for registrars. For one this, paired with subjective pricing, works as a mechanism to discourage squatting. It also prevents good names from ever being usable again just because someone lost interest or lost their wallet or something. Again, money is fungible, naming is not.
It’s in some ways a solved problem because you have your namecoins and unstoppable domains or whatever that technically work but also a hard problem to solve satisfactorily, every single attempt at this has a set of opinionated drawbacks.
There’s no answer to this problem that is clear cut like Bitcoin is to money, at least none that I’m aware of.
If domain names are only leased, that implies they are owned by the one leasing them out and just pushes back the question of how that person came to own them.
I don't think they own the names, but rather the ledger the names are in, which is sort of a map of names to real addresses. So, what you're leasing is the service of being mapped to a particular address. Please correct me wherever that's wrong.
You’re correct, but it gets muddier as you dive deeper.
ICANN controls the “DNS root”, meaning only them can issue TLDs such as .com, .net, .eu, .co.uk etc.
It is possible to spin up your own DNS root in the backyard but other people won’t be able to resolve your .whatever unless they trust you to be the next ICANN, because you wouldn’t only be able to claim control over just .whatever but the whole range of TLDs.
Ultimately you’re forced to bow to ICANN’s authority because that’s what everyone does. Doesn’t sound very sovereign to me.
Technically what they're doing isn't altering the frequency. They're modulating the amplitude of waves with that frequency (at least for AM radio).
It's sort of like how your house doesn't alter the geometric space it occupies, just the configuration of stuff in that space, but we grant exclusive right of use to the space as well as the material in it.
Something like domain names must be homesteadable, I think, but I don't know the tech well enough to say much more. I believe you're right that the domain names we're familiar with are more like a social convention.