Decentralized Domain Names: What Does DNS Mean in Web3?
5:42PM Nov 10, 2022
Speakers:
Tim Lordan
Alain Durand
Giovanna Fessenden
Chjango Unchained
Tom Barrett
Keywords:
icann
domain names
blockchain
decentralized
collision
web
dns
people
namespace
domains
internet
addressing
handshake
ens
trademark
issue
domain
abuse
unstoppable
bitcoin
Welcome, everybody. Welcome to today's event. I am Tim Lordan. And I'm with a relatively new organization called the Decentralized Future Council. It's a project of ours at the Internet Education Foundation to kind of put a sharper pencil on some of the policy issues around the emerging decentralized web. And we're just relatively new been around for like less than a year. The council Decentralized Future Council focuses on policy and the decentralized web space. Basically, beyond Bitcoin and cryptocurrencies. cryptocurrencies are really not our focus. Our focus is the larger ecosystem of decentralized technologies, like for instance, you won't see it's doing your briefing in the future on FTX and Binance. That's probably not why we're doing it all. And we do this with the help of the decentralized Filecoin Foundation for the Decentralized Web. They're great partners of ours. And today's event is we're looking at decentralized domain names, what did the DNS look like in web3, for the type of work that we do, and this is very similar to work that we did in the 1990s, with the Congressional Internet Caucus, and the State Of The Net Conference, is trying to help to explain a little bit about what these new technologies are. And so and you web3, now, you know, you have to explain why, you know, the internet packet switching is different from broadcast and cable televisions. And we have to do a little bit the same thing here. So there's some foundational things that we have to put down. So just Just bear with us a little bit. Most people either on this call are on this webinar, are very knowledgeable that the DNS and some are very knowledgeable about the decentralized web and domain addressing there. So we've had a different disciplines here. But we have a great panel of experts that know a lot about both. So let me just kind of start by explaining like what we think the decentralized web or sometimes people call it web3, what we think it is, and we kind of think of it as a larger ecosystem of decentralized technologies that include blockchains tokens, smart contracts, and we're really interested in like building, the way that developers are building new services and things like that, that really will, you know, make make the internet a better place. And that's kind of our hope. And we're not an advocacy organization, we're not a think tank or anything like that. But we try to kind of have conversations about these issues. So just to start off with, obviously, the domain name system has existed for a very long time. It used to be run literally by people. Sometimes people refer to him as the "God of the Internet," the famous John Postel, who passed away some time ago. And he kind of ran what we know is the domain name system, and ultimately, the Department of Commerce kind of moved that function over to ICANN, which is called the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers. Its governance, it's complicated. It's a multi stakeholder organization. And everybody has a say. It's allowed for a kind of scale of the Internet as we know it when it comes to registering domain names and making those name friendly, and the stability of it. So but I'm not going to go into a long conversation, but ICANN is and we're fortunate to have a representative from I can hear when it comes to kind of addressing when it comes to blockchains and decentralized technology. The same way with the DNS were like xerox.com is actually the human readable, friendly version of a list of IP addresses that go to a particular server. It's kind of the same way when it comes to decentralized web technologies. The content that is stored on the decentralized web often has a long, long string of numbers that are even less friendly in from a human readable perspective than domain names. And it's the same with crypto, crypto wallets where you have keys are long strings of numbers, not very human friendly, readable. So people obviously want to make more human readable versions of that, right. So that's what we're starting to see a lot of what we call domain or alternative addressing themes coming out when it comes to cryptocurrency, decentralized web technologies, there's a lot of them, and not not the least of which are our ENS, Handshake, Unstoppable Domains. And even to a certain extent, the Interplanetary File System. IPFS, from Filecoin or Protocol Labs is kind of addressing literally. Everybody's starting to do a lot of registrations for these domains. And, as it was the early days of the Internet, there's a lot of there's some burgeoning controversy. Last spring, a member of the Internet Law & Policy Foundry mentioned to me that the principal technologist of ICANN had wrote a document just laying some of the challenges out when it comes to all of these different addressing schemes. And you may have seen them on your Twitter feed like some people will put in their their twitter handle .ETF .ETH which is Ethereum. You'll you'll see other things like there's there were there was a couple of .COINs they were and then now there's a couple of .wallets and there's just a lot of different addressing schemes and what we wanted to talk today about like, how what happens, like who runs this? How do these things get registered? What is the, is there an ICANN version of this in the decentralized web? Or is this the responsibility of ICANN and government officials to bring some order here? I don't know. And how does it interact with existing law like trademark and copyright and how do you deal with some of those things? So the past several months has been some crazy things since I read that paper back in April. There's a lot of developments in the space. Giovanna just mentioned to me that at the Web Summit back in Lisbon a few weeks ago, even last week, there was a Domain Alliance announced and I don't even know much about that. So all of this stuff is really new, really exciting. And we have a great panel of speakers to kind of talk to us today about that. So let me just see if I can introduce them and not screw it up. The speakers that we have today are the through our first speaker is Alain Durand. He's great. He is the principal technologist for ICANN. And his name was the inspiration for his last name was the inspiration for the Mega Rock 80s Rock Band Duran Duran. I don't know if anybody knows that. But it's absolutely absolutely true. We also have Chjango Unchained. She's the Executive Director of the DWeb Foundation and Head of Ecosystem at Cosmos Network. And we're super excited to have Chjango with us today, because one of the things that we didn't do very well as an organization in the 1990s, was getting people actually developing technologies on the Internet to actually come to Washington and speak with policymakers. So I'm super grateful for that. And considering it's very early in the morning, where Chjango I am super appreciative. And we also have Giovanna Fessenden, who's counsel at Hamilton, Brock, Smith, and Reynolds. She's a IP attorney in the Massachusetts area, and Tom Barrett, who's president of enCirca and Tom has a lot of different other titles. Chjango has a lot of different titles. But they're, they're real experts in this area. So let me just like you know, start you know, with Alain, I read your paper, which is called "Challenges With Alternative Addressing" it is fascinating. And we'll we'll share this on Twitter, at our Twitter handle, which is down in the left handed corner. Can you just kind of like start us off by just talking about what are the challenges when it comes to alternative addressing in the decentralized web as we know it?
Oh, thank you, Tim. Thank you for having me. Maybe I will share my screen. And I have a couple of slides to help me to. I think, yeah, perfect. Perfect. So please move on to the next slide. Alright, so I wrote a paper earlier this year, it was a follow up to a blog post that I made at the very beginning of the year, which was called Buyer Beware. And this is when we started to hear a lot about alternative names coming onto the market. The goal of my paper was to really document some of the technical challenges that people will face when postings get deployed. And by people, I don't necessarily mean people buying those names and trying to use them. I mean, people like you and me, were on the other side. And that might be impacted one way or another by the mere existence of those names. The non goal was to talk about what is the governance model of all those different organizations. That's an important topic. But I'm part of the ICANN office of the CTO. It's a technical organization looking at technologies. So we decided that we should focus on the technology aspect of it and let our people dive deeper into the governance models of different organizations. There's a link here to my paper and I am sure my team we'll share it later. Next slide please. So background alternative naming systems. This is nothing new, actually, but even predates the existence of ICANN. Back in the early 2000s, late 1990s. There were a number of alternate routes that were proposed, and each of them as on namespace, and there was a potential for chaos. We have different routes they can existing. And that led to a publication of an ICANN document called ICP Freed in 2001. And then we come back to this document later. But then essentially was saying, well, there's less value, there's real value in having a unique root. And that has created essentially what we have called the "One World One Internet" that has been the foundation of success of this technology, and obviously industry in the last 20 something years. So why now? Well, the popularity of blockchain in general, and so has been bringing attention to blockchain based naming system. And a number of them. Tim talked about Handshake, ENS, Unstoppable Domains, seem that every few more weeks a new one is coming next.
Another thing is, you're starting to see some ICANN accredited registrars, selling domain names on this technology alongside to DNS domain names. And what are the potential to create some customer confusion and but that to me writing this blog, Buyer Beware, at the very beginning of the year. Next please. So when you deploy this alternative namespace, if you're doing with a name that you're buying, and you're creating your own environment with this technical challenges, but fairly easy to do. The question is, how can Internet user resolve those names? And how can they reach you? So you can build applications for them using some dedicated libraries? And there are a number of libraries existing for different programming languages on the market? Or what about legacy applications? Well, bridging techniques do exist. I will not go into details on all of them. But it's possible to get all what's the new world. Most of us building techniques required some kind of manual intervention. And that doesn't scale well beyond the early adopter, enthusiast stage. In the end, if you want people to reach you, you will have to not only tell them, what is your name, but you will have to tell them how to get to you, which tool to use, which extension to install. And that's my raise the bar, so you see. Next slide, please. When you use those bridges, those bridges are not going to be deployed uniformly across the Internet. And that can create some instability. For example, when I'm at home, which I am today, I'm using my connection, and I'm in the in the Alps. And I'm lucky enough now in the last few weeks to have fiber connection to my house. So right now I'm using fiber, but in some parts of my house, the Wi Fi coverage is not very good. And I'm using cellular. My cellular provider uses a different bridge to this alternate namespace. When the fiber provider, or one of our music waiting that one does not when depending on where I am in the house, I'm not going to have the same resolution. And that's a bit of a problem. All this will lead to support calls to service providers in frustration. So next please. So that was a challenge when you have one alternative namespace alongside with DNS. But what about multiple alternative namespace, as I said at the beginning, and as Tim mentioned earlier in this, in this conversation, there are multiple alternative domain names that are not offering domains was not coordinated. There's no community driven coordination. Neither between those alternative names space nor between those and DNS. And because there is no community driven coordination, then name collisions will be unavoidable. So a naive approach to this is to say, well, there are more namespace to choose from so if I cannot get the name I want somewhere, I will get it in another namespace. Great. But how do we use a youth? Which, what I tell them to use this particular app? Well, I think application can only connect to one namespace at a time. So again, as my example with my house having several different coverage over cellular or Wi Fi, this will lead to unstable unpredictable name resolution, and that is really the problem. So next please. you're going to collect a little bit of this this lack of coordination presents a serious risk of fragmentation of the Internet with separate ecosystem. And that's really the main point I wanted to drive today.
And Alain. We've been doing briefings for at least a dozen years for traditional Internet policy communities about the potential of a splinter net or internet fragmentation. It's a big topic in Internet governance circles. But this actually, from a technical perspective, presents, you know, maybe that is manifestation of that risk. Can you umm ... we already have a question in the in the chat about asking you to explain what is a blockchain based domain name? Like, how can you have two different dot wallets? Like for instance?
So you mentioned people, humans, they don't like numbers. They like names. If my name will be 1234578, nobody will remember my name is Alan, well, it's more likely that somebody will even remember who I am. So there has to be a process to somehow map those names into something that is meaningful to the applications. What is that meaningful to blockchain based application is essentially a pointer handle to some kind of a block somewhere in the chain. What is useful to a web browser is an IP address. So this mapping could have been done in the DNS for any kind of application, you could in a blockchain application create an extension to the DNS to map a name to the actual crypto address of the wallet. Blockchain supporters decided to not go that route, but instead decided to implement their own mechanism to do this resolution inside of a blockchain. And to do that create their own namespace that is different from the namespace we use on the Internet. And that is the root cause of the issue.
So thank thank you for that kind of overview on the challenges Chjango, I'd like to go to you and your you've kind of been involved in the development of Handshake, which is one of the decentralized web naming technologies, can you kind of give the the people here kind of like a sense of what handshake is how do like these technologies work when it comes to naming as a substitute for like a wallet or for you know, content on a blockchain?
Sure, and just to emphasize the Handshake is differentiated from other naming projects, because Handshake actually does resolve on DNS. And just like Alain said, the other naming projects like ENS, and Unstoppable Domains, and every other copy of ENS, essentially, is just appending a human readable name to a wallet address, which means that it only works within their ecosystem. And it's specialized for Ethereum, for example, so ENS names are human readable names for transacting within the Ethereum ecosystem, specifically. The way that you can think about that is Ethereum is on Mars, and they have no bridge to get back to Earth. Where you know, Earth is ICANN DNS. And Handshake is more like a rocket ship that sends messages back and forth. So Handshake is really the bridge that works for both ecosystems because right now, if you look at the state of web three domain names, in the blockchain space, they are all operating in Mars with no means to get back to Earth. And so the model that a lot of projects like unstoppable domains has taken is do Web3 domain names on Mars, but just tried to build their way back to Earth, and hope that they could spend enough money so that Earth will enforce its ICANN rules for Mars, without without Mars paying the cost of actually like building any ship for speaking back and forth between the two. And that's really the biggest differentiator, I would say between those projects that are building in this sort of like meta internet compared to the internet that works today that we call Web 2.
That's great. And that's a great metaphor and analogy. Thank you so much.
I can chime in a little bit just to give some clarity. So, you know, in the blockchain space, there are so many different types of blockchains and they're not, you know, compatible with each other. So you have Aetherium is one blockchain. Bitcoin is the most famous kind of blockchain. It doesn't have these kind of, you know, the blockchain domains are an NFT. They're not actually a domain name. They are a non fungible token. And Bitcoin doesn't really, isn't set up to handle those kinds of things. And, you know, NFT's are quite, you know, a great innovation that's on the Ethereum platform. And they're just like the internet. There's many layers of Aetherium. So there's like the layer one, which is the Ethereum blockchain. And on top of that, there's many other different types of blockchains that are their own entities. So they're, they're, you know, there's one blockchain called Polygon, which is what unstoppable domains. So that unstoppable is a domain of blockchain domain name, provider, and polygon. So any web three interface, which could be a browser, like Opera. Opera is a browser that enables you to look at web three. And right now, it's not a graphical user interface. It's really, I mean, it's it's mostly just text that you can see, when you're looking at the blockchain. It's it does, it's unlike web three, web two, which is our normal internet, you know, which is graphical, it's much more interactive. Web three, the blockchain interface, is more transactional, it just sort of shows you, you know, what, all of these NFT's and tokens and who owns them. And the idea by behind when you have ownership of, of a token on the blockchain that's recorded there. As you know, Alain mentioned that it's quite, you know, a series of your wallet address, it maps it to your wallet address, and it's a series of numbers and letters, and it's quite a long string. And the idea it with the domain name, NFTs for web three is to replace that long string with like an easy name. So like, I have Giovannatech.NFT. So anybody can take my domain name, if my blockchain domain and send me money, I can request money from others using my cryptocurrency wallet, you can interface and do transactions, you know, all over the world through your wallet. And eventually, in the future, we'll all be using our wallets to interface, you know, throughout the interviewing transactions and mapping it to our websites and for all sorts of different functionality. It's like, it's just we're just sort of at the tip of the iceberg of what we can do with these NFT's.
So the if that's hope that's kind of clear, I think it's really, it's super complicated. And I'm not an expert by any means. But I'm glad we have some experts on, I guess, I guess the next question is Chjango. How does how does like, how does this universe of planets and rocket ships, ultimately, or do they ultimately, interface with the Domain Name Service in ICANN and the IANA function and just I think I should mention that Alain from ICANN is not going to be commenting on ICANN policy. He's their principal technologist, and he's here to explain how a lot of this stuff works. But I'm not one, I'm not going to put him on the spot by asking you to comment on policy, how does it work? How does it interface, how will it interface with the DNS at some point?
So So what Giovanna had alluded to is absolutely correct in that these blockchain domain names are strictly they're, they're toys, right. So all except Handshake. So so we have done a disservice for people from the outside looking in into the space by calling these things domain names, because again, what they've done is created human readable names, and appended them or associated them with, you know, Hex strings 0 X, this dot this. And the only way that they could connect it back to like traditional domains is by making that a subdomain on leave a dot ETH. So, and short of integrations from browsers and everything, linking it back to to traditional DNS, they don't actually resolve in DNS, well, except for Dotties. So here's the thing. If you have Unstoppable projects, that copy the unstoppable model, really don't resolve in DNS or speak in any way shape or form on the people on earth, who are using traditional DNS. And these people call it web three domains. I think the nomenclature is, is wrong and it makes it confusing because that lends itself to saying that okay, you know, we didn't do any of the work to connect back to DNS. But we're going to call ourselves a top level domain and create all these name collisions, you know, which is why I think that there is a role for ICANN in this world to continue being the the name conflict resolver, because you already have established processes in place to be able to effectively do that. And that means that you guys have to create a right to create a line in the sand, which is, okay, you know, if it doesn't resolve resolve in traditional DNS, maybe it doesn't count, right? If so, there are people in blockchain domain name space, who are more, I guess, honest about what it is that they're building. And they're saying, Okay, well, I'm gonna have a dot cosmos or a dot soul, or a dot, dot for polka dot. And these names are strictly the specific to transferring value between this specific ecosystem. And by the specific ecosystem. I mean, if I have a dot Cosmos, well, then you know that this is specific to the cosmos blockchain. Or if I have a dot ETH, that these names are specifically for transferring money across these names on the Ethereum Blockchain. So that's really what those things are. And it's a completely different conversation from handshake where it actually does create an alternative root zone that augments what I can have. So that's the distinction right there. And right now, what I'm hearing from everyone here is that there's a conflation of the two. And we really need to do a lot of education to help people understand that these two are completely different and not in the same ballpark.
Right. So unlike then, in the traditional web, where you have like a Universal Resource Locator, or like a URL, or there was just one that maps to a specific site, and when you know, that often is a domain name, it's your URL. There's no universal URL in, in the blockchain space and web three at this time, because it's so fractured, there's so many different blockchains. And they're not centralized and communicating with each other. There's one predominant entity, which is Aetherium namespace, and they're issuing blockchain domains. And those are accepted by like, the standard browsers. So they seem to just have the, you know, the most acceptance and then you have outfits like unstoppable issuing their own domains, but it's not integrated yet in the browser. So the browser's are not accepting, you know, you have to plug in an extension to make these web three browsers like Opera, be able to decipher the URLs. But that so it's not it's not integrated yet. But for Aetherium namespace is it's the most accepted domain name, blockchain domain name, if you want to call it that. provider at this time.
No, I'm sure Tom. Tom has some perspectives on this. And before I have him speak, let me just I'm trying to answer the questions in the in the q&a. Somebody asked like, Well, they're asking Alain, and I don't think Alain can speak to this, so I'm gonna throw it out for Tom and others. You think that ICANN can regulate those all they're calling them all DNS is, at least for you know, those managed by ICANN and ICANN accredited registrar's? Right. So if it's an accredited registrar, registering kind of, again, I'm using the term web three just for brevity, web three domains, Can ICANN regulate those? So and I don't want to make you say what, whatever you wanted to say before, Tom?
Hey, thanks. Yeah, I'd like to make a few points. I think what you're hearing from Chjango, Giovanna is that the web three domain space is not. They're not they don't all have the same use case. And they're not all approaching their technology in the same way. And so is a traditional technology adoption lifecycle, and we're still in the early phase of that lifecycle. Where no one has a complete solution yet or a complete eco system yet compared to the traditional ICANN namespace. And so the things like you know, there's there requires manual intervention, well, that was true in the early days of the internet as well, and the factory needed bridging techniques. In fact, it's still ongoing. There's you know, ICANN is still has a universal acceptance group that even 10 years after the last round, is finding persistent problems in getting ICANN TLDs to work across their ecosystem. And so this is our never ending battle for for domain names. I certainly think that, you know, I'm the chair of the blockchain committee for the International Trademark Association. We see these as emerging brand identifiers that needs to be addressed from a trademark abuse perspective. And so it's not going to be a UDRP. Because of the way the blockchain, in fact that the constitution of ENS, for example, is name ownership shall not be infringed. Right. And so they have a wholly totally different principle about how they will respect IP rights and third party rights. But we do think that will be a dispute process put in place to protect both trademarks and copyrights across web three, the decentralized web, and that will help bridge across the chasm, basically, from early adopters into mainstream adoption. I do I do want to take one issue with Alain's comments earlier, saying that an application can only support one naming service. That's absolutely not true. There are applications out there today, Brave's a great example, that are supporting multiple naming systems today. It only becomes an issue when they start to have colliding top level domains. But if they're not colliding, then there's literally no reason why an application a Chrome or Firefox can you know, is unable to support multiple naming services. So the real issue real conflict, I think, is the collision issue, which I think we'll get into soon.
Yeah, we'll get into the collusion issue. Soon. I don't know if Alain wants to comment back on that on Tom's point about multiple, multiple.
But that's actually is the crux of the issue is that if you connect to multiple places, and you have absolutely no way to resolve those collision, then you actually bring chaos to the party, because the resolution process will be dependent on the order in which those different namespaces will be queried. So you may have one result in one place, another result in another place. And that's not exactly something that will help consumers.
Right. And so there are so this is a recognized problem in the web three space. There are two efforts underway right now, as we speak, I just saw announced last week called the web three Domain Alliance. And there's also a Hedera based effort called the decentralized DNS DAO. And DAO is, by the way, stands for Decentralized Autonomous Organizations. It's how blockchains do governance. And there's basically every NFT project out there are going to eventually have a DAO to do governance. And there'll be Dows that do governance across naming services, across blockchains, to basically allow the industry to cooperate.
Just to give you an idea about how broken DAOs are right now, is they're managed by a multisig, a multi signature scheme, which means that, you know, it could be five or 10 people at most, in those multi signature groups. And that is arguably more centralized and less process based, with no accountability to any jurisdiction that regulate them, then then anything else that exists in meatspace? So though, that's arguably, you know, moving backwards, so I wouldn't say that that the panacea, and looking at what unstoppable domains has done it looks like a like, desperate claw to you in in the face of losing battle with their with their trademark battles.
Yeah. So Unstoppable, I think, hasn't formed a DAO yet. I should acknowledge that. But they've also are suggesting that the solution to collisions is to have trademark rights recognized in these generic strings. So that's not likely to be accepted by the court. And not likely, obviously, it's not accepted by trademark offices today. But DOAs are definitely a fast moving target. There's litigation right now called the Ooki litigation, where a DAO is being sued by the CFTC. The Commodity Future Creating Commission. And what it's forcing every blockchain project to do is to say, look, we need to, we need a legal entity. This Dao can't simply be a smart contract. It has to be a legal entity, and we have to pick the right jurisdiction for it. And so what you're seeing now are just like Delaware is a magnet for people want to incorporate themselves, you see places like the state of Wyoming, as already has a Dow wrapper, you see, Florida and Texas, starting to create something called Dow rappers, the Marshall Islands. And so there's a mad scramble to figure out how do we, we govern ourselves in a way that also provides a liability shield to the members that are participating in web three governance.
And so we're gonna get to collisions in a bit. I think Alain has a quick presentation. I want to save, there's a lot of questions. So I want to save some, some more time for q&a at the end. But since we're on the topic of like trademark law and copyright law, Giovanna, you're, you're you're an attorney. This is your bread and butter. What, is there any rule - I know, this folks registered for this webinar from NTIA and the Department Commerce as well as the US Patent and Trademark Office - You know, what is the what is the legal framework here?
Well, I mean, there's the issue of protection, you know, enforcing your rights in the web three space, which is very challenging, it's not super clear on you know, how you might do that with it, would it just because it's, there isn't a centralized authority that is controlling, you know, the, the issuance of the domain, so at least for like, ens, for example, the Etherium Name System, and they are not as as Thomas indicated, they're not enforcing they're not like unstoppable has a list of famous marks. And they're not issuing trademarks, red, they're not issuing domain names for any of the famous marks unless you prove that you have a registration, a trademark registration for that mark. But Ethereum name service is it sort of free for all. So if you go and try to find like, I've looked to try to find my clients' marks on there, and many of them are already taken. And in fact, many, you know, I, you know, even famous, famous marks are taken, and I wouldn't be surprised if it's not the trademark owner that has those that owns those NFT domain tokens. So it's quite a challenge. And it's not exactly clear on how you would enforce your rights in that space, who it'd be quite a, it's it's challenging, but it's, again, it's an evolving space. And, and in terms of registration at the Trademark Office, I mean, I think that I, you know, I think it's it's a smart move on the Patent and Trademark Office to to not be issuing trademark registrations on top level domains for web three, for any top level domain, but you know, in particular, for web three, I think it's, it's, it's helpful, and I understand that unstoppable has had quite a challenge. They haven't been able, although they might have had some of them allowed, they haven't been able to submit a specimen that would, you know, qualify to show use of the mark so they haven't, they haven't gotten any registrations in that space. So it's Go ahead.
I think Chjango has a perspective on this. But I'll also note that again. Chjango mentioned earlier. The Senator .. US Senator Patrick Leahy and Senator Tillis, at the Patent Trademark Office were like, can you help kind of do a little more fact finding on what NFT's are? And how do they relate to intellectual property? And so that process is ongoing. I think they'll announced in a week or two, that whole process, I don't know what it will take into effect, you know, the domain name issue. And by the way, I have to apologize, everybody in the call for nomenclature, right. I've been using web three shorthand. Some people want to hit me with a hatchet when I say when three, because they don't like that term. And then also, when it comes to domain names, I can see through the, through the the q&a, that there are probably people on this webinar silently screaming, don't call it "domain names." If it's on a blockchain or web three, I apologize. But I do doing shorthand when it comes to some of these things just to kind of lay in the domain that of policy issues that we're talking about, in that matter, you know, the people that are, you know, end to end encryption enthusiast, which we all should be actually, I apologize for calling it crypto. You know, that's supposed to be an end to end encryption. So,
yeah, well, I have one other thing just so trademarks are one issue, but I'm, I'm a computer scientist. I'm a patent attorney. And you know, the innovation on the innovation side with NFT domain names, if you want to call it that, but just what the NFT can do. It's those that's a huge, you know, space and there's endless possibilities, and it's very exciting. So, in that space, there's a lot of IP to be had. And it's, it's evolving, and it's interesting, and it's exciting and that's going to be transformative in the next 10 to 20 years about, you know, it'll be, you know, something that we'll commonly use and you won't even, you know, it'll just creep up on us and it'll be part of our daily life that will have these kinds of NFT domain names or, you know, just NFT. So that that's what we use to do business.
So, Tim, real quick, you mentioned the USPTO. So, the USPTO, as well as the European Union PTO, and WIPO, these trademark offices are looking for guidance from folks like the Trademark Association, as well as WIPO in terms of how should they regard virtual goods of a metaverse. How should they read? How should they address concerns about trademarks and trademark abuse with NFT's? And so I'm actually in Miami next week for the INTA leadership meeting, where we're presenting to the board of directors 100-page NFT white paper that that outlines all a lot of these issues we're talking about today. But also because not just about web three domain names, but NFT's in general. And what should the industry, the trademark industry, be doing to address this this sort of concern and threat. And so I do think that we'll be coming out of this a process to address trademark disputes and cybersquatting on web three, not just with domain names, metaverses in general. So I the USPTO is looking to get to help them define what that might look like. And so I think you'll see some developments on that in 2023.
Yeah, I mean, because the environment is so fractured, I could see, you know, like handshake being important in trying to enforce, you know, filter out what's allowed or what's not or the browsers, I think it's going to put a lot more focus on the technology that is, you know, transmitting the data, the NFT, to be able to apply enforcement, because it might be challenging to do it otherwise, you know, it'll be interesting to figure out how they can actually, you know, implement enforcement, whether it will be the inner, you know, the, the browser or, you know, a process that is communicating the NFT. I mean, so it's, it's not like we have this universal domain name or NFT domain database that you can go and, and, and augment or fix or, you know, block.
So, well on, do you want to, I promise, we kind of talk a little bit about collisions, because all collisions are different, right in the eye of the beholder, like some are, some are fender benders, and some are, you know, 40 car pile ups on the on route 95. Do you want to just just do some of your slides on kind of explaining what a collision is?
Sure. But just before that, if you allow me to have 40 seconds. We have been talking about patent trademark infringement. But there's another aspect also that we should not forget, which is how to deal with domain name abuse. And that has been a serious problem in the industry. And there are processes that exist today in the ICANN world to deal with that, to actually do takedowns of domains. The one of the open question, but still unresolved now is, how will this map into those blockchain names because from what I understand, it's actually impossible to remove something from a blockchain. So that will make this task of doing well, domain name abuse mitigation and a lot more complicated,
right, a quick follow up to that is, so it's not going to look like UDRP, where you can transfer ownership of a digital asset, that would be more similar to a URS, where there's a takedown and a blacklisting process for DNS abuse and trademark abuse etc.
So all of those are issues that somehow need to be put on the table and discussed by the entire community. That was actually the purpose of my paper is to just some discussion on this topics. So I want to talk a little bit about name collision because sometimes name collision is very abstract, and people say okay, doesn't really matter. So I want to illustrate with with a little cartoon it's supposed to be humoristic so bear with me, it's not 100% real. So let's go ahead. That's a story of two character John and Sally. And John is kind of a geeky guy and always wants to be on the cutting edge of technology. Sally's girlfriend is a little bit more reserved. So just because I want a new domain name and Oh, I like to use blockchain is hot new technology now. And it goes to a third character called Market and market can you give me something cool and Market says I can sell you John dot Kryptonite. Sure. Sounds nice. Next slide please. It goes to his girlfriend. Sally. You can connect with me. John dot Kryptonite right as he tries this on a computer it doesn't where. Next slide. Oh justice I forgot to tell you you first need to install the cool web browser and, I never heard of it said Sally. Is that safe. Next. And John goes again, I found another technology cool technology to try this all blockchain lots of cool stuff where goes back to Market can I get another domain there show Market says John dot SuperBlockchain. Next. Of course John goes back to Sally, Hey some more new stuff for you try John dot SuperBlockchain, and Sally says, John, I did try your special browser you told me last time but it doesn't work with your new new domain question mark. Next. Oh Sally, I forgot to tell you this is yet another blockchain so you need to install this other browser vendors other plugin to it ... Go away. Next. A little bit later, she comes by because she really likes John. John, is actually full of all of us that he gave me and I've can see you on the Super blockchain. But when I tried John dot kryptonite now, I see my ex boyfriend's profile. That's not good. What I don't know if anything is showing your cell phone. That's me. No that's you. Big big fight. Next. And John goes to Market and it says Sally is very unhappy. She sees different things when she types John dot Kryptonite and than I do. Market says, Well that's name collision for you. Kryptonite is very popular. It's available on at least three different blockchains. Your computer is not set up the same way as Sally's. You look in one name space and look in another. No wonder you'll see different things. Next. That outcome is not unique. And nobody guarantees This is unique. That's the point. Actually, John dot Kryptonite is available in a third blockchain. Do you want to buy it? Or should I sell it to Sally's ex boyfriend? Next, please. This is really, really stupid. I want to go back to my old John dot ICANN TLD domain. At least that one was unique. And Market says haha haha. No, no, no, you can't escape name collision. See, this ICANN dot TLD is available in five different alternative naming systems. Maybe you can create your own alternative naming systems and John says, Market, you're a monster. The Internet is not completely broken. So thank you for allowing me this little touch of humor to illustrate why name collision is an important problem and can affect everybody, not just people buying the domains.
If I could just
Wait. Doesn't everybody feel bad for John and Sally? Poor guy.
So it was interesting, just as a debate in the chat about, Don't call these domain names. That's a big mistake. So the real question is you also have to define collisions as well. And so I'm involved with the ICANN name collision advisory process. And and the method of a collision is is there error traffic going to the root servers. And it's not clear that blockchain based collisions are causing error traffic to the root servers or even any traffic to the traditional DNS. And so it's a it's an interesting, and pretty much expands the definition of collisions into areas that has not yet been studied, in terms of how do we analyze and assess how much of these collisions are happening in the traditional DNS? How do we measure those collisions? There's another round coming up. How do we assess potential consumer harm to introducing a new ICANN TLD if we don't see this collision at the root servers. So it's, it opens up a whole set of questions that have yet to be explored. That will be interesting in the next few years. So
We could see some of that at the root, because things leak. And they're supposed to be in an isolated ecosystem, but actually, they leak out in different parts of the world. And we do see some intimate traces of that attribute. So it's not a perfect measurement. And I agree with you, that's the topic. But in more research, we, in my group, we started some research on this very vague question, but we do see some of the things.
And one thing I want to drill down a little bit about is Tom openned the door to discussion of abuse. So we do a lot of work in the kind of trust and safety field, right. So when it comes to abuse, whether it be copyright infringement, whether it be child sexual exploitation images, when it comes to just general general types of abuse that is really at the heart of like a lot of the conversations that we're having today about Section 230 and about things like that, what is what is the what is the abuse resolution system going to be for this new domain space or or addressing system? And you know, when it comes to trust and safety, as we call it, or abuse resolution, there different responsibilities at different levels of the stack, right? And the DNS or the root is kind of the base, the base of the stack, you know, then you go up to like Cloudflare and other levels up to the stack to the services that have social media and things like that. But what is the abuse resolution system for this new space going to be?
I think it's going to be similar to what we have today. You have multiple groups that will identify websites and addresses that are abusing. They're doing phishing, farming, trademark abuse, cybersquatting, child sex abuse, and they develop blacklists, that then the ecosystem starts to pay attention to and follow. So they can provide a a rich user experience for end users. And I think that you'll see web three start to adopt many of those same blacklists in their echo system. Because again, they don't know is it they all want to provide a rich user experience, they want brands to adopt, the venture capitalists are motivated to make sure that they have an exit, so they need adoption. So I think you'll see voluntary adoption of of all the multiple blacklists that are a targeting different types of abuse.
And for the Department of Justice officials on this on this webinar, what is what is the response law enforcement look
like? Well, I think we proceed with the CFTC, you can, you'll be able to go after, no one is unreachable, right there finding folks who have who have stolen or laundered Bitcoin. Nothing is truly decentralized. And if you can't find the actual culprit, as of the they will go after the ecosystem itself, they'll go after Cloudflare, they'll go after crowd Chrome. And they'll insist that they they enforce the law.
So just to just to add some color to that, you know, if you, there's a difference between the cash grab projects, which are centralized, most likely, like if you look at Unstoppable they're they're a company, a corporation, and you could enforce the law over them, just like you would enforce it over anyone else. But then there are, there's this other side of the spectrum in this space where there's a high emphasis on decentralization. And if you look at every part of the stack, and what its application is addressing, and how its governance works out, it is actually fundamentally decentralized. There's so when you look at Bitcoin, compared to other alternative coins, there's there's a big difference, right? There's a reason why OFAC is able to sanction Aetherium and not Bitcoin. So, understanding those.
OFAC OFAC was an acronym I had forgotten from 20 years ago. Can you explain OFAC is?
Yeah. OFAC is I forgot the acronym, Office of the, I don't remember the acronym, what the acronym stands for right now. But it's it's the it's the office that imposes sanctions on sanctioned countries. And if you if you violate those sanctions, then you're by definition, a terrorist. So North Korea, Russia, you know, these these are sanction countries Venezuela and because of geopolitics. So, in the recent precedent, OFAC has added certain Aetherium addresses to its list so that validators on chain - validators meaning people who are basically able to append to this blockchain, that is a permission, right. Only validators can do that. So, not everybody can can read and write to the blockchain. Validators are the service providers that do that same same way as miners do for Bitcoin. Reason for that is because Aetherium has now arguably arguably become more centralized. And there's a lot more centralization choke points that regulators can come in and force. And they can't do that on Bitcoin. So understanding that nuance is key, though with with handshake it's the same thing it's it's same governance model same decentralization, it's it's a permissionless network, but in order to append to it you need to expend hash power. And if you if you try to apply this lens to any other web three domaining project, you can't so you know, there's a company behind unstoppable, there's a company behind ENS, if anyone wanted to come and subpoena them and try to stop them in their tracks, they can't. But if you try to apply that same logic to handshake, you can't stay away as why governments can't like subpoena miners on on Bitcoin and try to impose OFAC sanctions and have them censors specific addresses on the Bitcoin Blockchain, you just can't do it by the structural nature of those blockchains. So there's so there's a nuance there. You know, also on the, you know, centralization point, if you ask the certain subsection, sub sectors of the crypto industry, people really want to, like some people really want to radically decentralize. So there's a difference between can't be evil and won't be evil, you know, on handshake, you can't be evil. But, you know, on other naming projects, they claim they won't, but they totally can. Therein lies the difference as well. So that's something important to keep in mind.
Well, I think we're out of time. And I, there's so much, there's so much more we could we could do. And I hate to cut it short, but I promised everybody would be an hour. So this has been fascinating. Again, we're just the Decentralized Future Council. We're just trying to kind of lay down some foundational discussions about emerging policy in the decentralized web and kind of connecting it to internet policy. And web 2.0. I mean, I think by in the 1990s, in 1998, you had the Clinton Administration come out with their green paper about the domain name system. And that was hugely influential on bringing people together into a multi stakeholder perspective. I don't know if there'll be something like that for the decentralized web, I have no idea. But these things happened early. And, you know, in 1998, a lot of people weren't paying attention to what was going on, but somebody in the Clinton Administration was, and that'll happen here in Washington, too. So I'd like to thank everybody. Chjango, for representing the the decentralized community has been great in getting up really early to start your day. Alain, thank you for beaming in from France, where you're ending your day, and Giovanna and Tom for coming from beautiful Massachusetts, this has been a great conversation. We're going to we're going to put this on YouTube and chop this up and put out a transcript. So there's been fascinating, thank you. Thank you so much, everybody.
Thank you so much to him for hosting. I think these conversations are really important for both sides to understand each other a lot better. Clearly, this is a multi year process. So I would love to continue this on as a theory if if you would oblige.
