DNS is probably a bad example here. While DNS does have federated servers in the end the entire system is controlled by whoever controls the root name servers. It's pretty much the definition of centralized control.
DNS is just a glorified search engine that’s controlled top-down by ICANN.
Anyone can build a different, distributed search engine where things are looked up on a DHT by their hash.
I have come to the conclusion, and have since then ofted said, that URLs do NOT need to be human-readable, and the idea of hostnames and domains tied to IP ranges will eventually give way to far lighter weight things
I keep hoping content-addressed hashes will take off but even IPFS had to invent IPNS so we're probably not collectively ready as a species to move away from name->technical_ID mappings.
I do not think your assumption is correct here. If you and I and 1,000,000 of our friends decided to create our own root name servers and co-opt the .com domain for our own purposes then there is nothing that would/could stop us and all existing software would work as expected (modulo the fact that DNS mappings would use a different source of truth than that used by most other participants on the network.) The fact that we all tend to agree upon the same root servers means that we share the same source of truth regarding tld mappings, but there is nothing that says we all need to use these same root servers.
Except that even if you use your own paper currency, you have to pay taxes in your country's oficial currency. Taxes are usually a significant amount of every transaction. So, the new system will very quickly bleed out.
Because of that and other reasons, it is in practice impossible to make your own paper currency.
Close. There is nothing illegal (in the US) about creating your own currency as long as it is convertible to USD. With domain names there is no such requirement to interoperate with the existing root nameservers and ICAAN tlds. In your private .com there is no requirement that the facebook.com A record map to facebook IP addresses so you could collectively decide to map it to 127.0.0.1 and no one could do anything to stop you.
That's like saying anyone could open their own Facebook, and therefore Facebook is not centralized.
The DNS is centralized, even if domain names are used in conjunction with decentralized protocols like TCP/IP, and even if anyone is free to create their own instance of a DNS.
The only sense in which it's decentralized is in relation to the legal right to operate one. It is a free market institution, instead of government-instituted monopoly.
Handshake is building a decentralized DNS layer to address this. TLDR; it's a blockchain anyone can use to register a TLD on and it improves the security model by getting rid of CAs.
Disclaimer: building a company on top of Handshake
