Actually some of the others are just objectively better. Like local authorities which can adapt rules to local conditions and give people the option to exit and go somewhere else if the local rules are sufficiently outside what they find reasonable.
It's like asking whether you'd prefer your landlord to have a national monopoly on land. (No.)
So you're saying DNS registration should work more like how living in a physical place works? Well, where I live,
- My landlord and my city are both subject to laws from a national government, and if they're egregiously misbehaving, the national government can step in, but they usually don't.
- If I switch landlords, let alone cities, my address changes.
- I can choose a landlord and to a lesser extent a city by reputation, but I might end up choosing a city because it's where I want to be for business etc. reasons, even if I disagree with its leadership choices
- I have limited ability to influence my city's decision-making and essentially no ability to influence my nation's decision-making, but it's not unheard of.
Which all seems very similar to having a choice of registrar, limited choice of TLD/registry, no choice in ICANN, the theoretical (and occasionally practical, as in this case) ability to influence ICANN, and the ability to change registrars and TLDs if I like - as long as I'm okay changing addresses.
> my landlord and my city are both subject to laws from a national government, and if they're egregiously misbehaving, the national government can step in, but they usually don't
On the other hand, your city is also subject to its constituents, who care more about what happens there than people in the nation's capital do, so you already have a mechanism to hold them to account when they misbehave. (And the city has jurisdiction over the local landlords.)
Meanwhile, what do you do if the national government is doing something that ruins your life, but there aren't enough similarly situated people to get them to stop? If it was only a city you could at least move.
> if I switch landlords, let alone cities, my address changes
This is costly. It could still be less costly than having nowhere to hide from policies that cause you significant harm, which makes the availability of that option very valuable.
> I can choose a landlord and to a lesser extent a city by reputation, but I might end up choosing a city because it's where I want to be for business etc. reasons, even if I disagree with its leadership choices
It's all trade offs. If you really want to be there for business reasons and mildly dislike their policies then you might go there anyway. If there are minor business reasons they're preferable but their policies make your life unlivable you might go somewhere else. This is still better than having the unlivable policies imposed nationally, whereupon you would choose your location for business reasons (because the ruinous policy is everywhere), but still have a worse life than having to move to avoid bad policies, because then you'd at least have actually avoided them.
> I have limited ability to influence my city's decision-making and essentially no ability to influence my nation's decision-making, but it's not unheard of
It's not a binary matter of impossibility, it's a matter of difficulty level. Getting your city to do something is a lot easier than getting your whole country to do it, and they're more likely to be receptive to local problems because a larger percentage of their constituents are affected by them.
> Which all seems very similar to having a choice of registrar, limited choice of TLD/registry, no choice in ICANN, the theoretical (and practical, in this case) ability to influence ICANN, and the ability to change registrars and TLDs if I like.
It's not the wrong analogy, the question is how much (if any) of the authority actually has to be in ICANN. You could in theory give them no power at all, or have them not exist, and rest control of each gTLD entirely with its respective registrar.
I could even turn it around and say that the problem here is that the .org registry is itself too centralized and once it delegates a name to someone it should cease to be under the registrar's control and become permanently under the control of the domain owner, so that who owns .org would only matter to new registrants and not existing ones who already have their delegations.
I agree that all of these things are bad - my point is that it's the worst system except for all the others.
Neither of your proposed replacement systems seem like they'd make things overall better with regards to the actual concerns of .org domain name owners.
> My landlord and my city are both subject to laws from a national government, and if they're egregiously misbehaving, the national government can step in, but they usually don't.
It looks like a bait-and-switch by trying to perform some comparison to a non-centralized authority while invoking it (using the odd "national government" phrase) in the same breath.
> The fact that the central authority made the right call in this instance doesn’t ultimately mean that the central authority isn’t still dangerous.
> I hope this serves as a wake-up call to everyone who got scared by this.
In this comment, "central authority" means ICANN, who has oversight over registry operations, not the .org registry themselves.
I am reading this comment as saying that the very idea of having a centralized authority like ICANN is dangerous and we need something else (like a blockchain or whatever). I am claiming that it's fine because the alternatives are all worse.
The next comment tried to say, well, in the case of physical housing, your landlord or city doesn't have total control. But the landlord or city is not in the place of the "central authority" here - they are analogous to a registrar or registry. In the same way that my national government is flawed but better than not having one, ICANN is flawed but better than not having it.
Well, there really is a national monopoly on land. There is no "ownership" natural to the world, just the social contract between the people and their government ensuring rule of law, protection of rights, etc.
Fortunately it's also what allows you to move somewhere else where it works much better.
Having different problems in different places is actually preferable to having the same problems everywhere, because different problems affect different people differently. It gives people choice. If you don't like San Francisco, move to Austin, or New York, or Miami. Whereas if a central authority makes a rule you can't live under there is nowhere to hide.
And even if you stay where you are, it gives you more of a voice, because you aren't being diluted by a constituency so large you can never be heard.
> You mean like moving from .org domain to something else?
Consider the alternative -- corruption at ICANN where they sell the root to a private company. Then what are you going to do, move from DNS whatsoever?
> The whole point is that certain resources (like gTLD) are global in nature.
It's only "global" in the sense that its jurisdictional boundaries are administrative rather than regional. The .org gTLD is operated by different people than the .com gTLD.
But .org has a semantic monopoly on “gTLD for NGOs”. If I want to start a new non profit I want a .org, not a .com. One is not an alternative for the other.
That's in fact my exact point. It doesn't let you move somewhere else because local governments have set themselves up to only be accountable to a small group of people that already live in the city. (AKA fuck you, I got mine)
If housing costs were lower, more people would be able to move to the bay area and take advantage of the incredible wealth creation and job opportunities available.
I wouldn't be shocked if the bay areas housing policies were responsible for the loss of 1 percent of GDP growth every year in this county.
Local authority is still centralized wrt. a local problem :).
It's always nice to have options by being able to deal with multiple people... except when a given issue becomes a tragedy of the commons or some other kind of coordination problem, at which point you really want to have a single superior authority above the ones you were dealing with. This applies recursively. So you want to have one city authority, but many cities; one county authority, but many counties; one state authority, but many states; one country authority, but many countries...
It's like asking whether you'd prefer your landlord to have a national monopoly on land. (No.)