I couldn’t agree more, we need an ecosystem-wide TLD and we need to revive the IC Naming System Technical Working Group which was making important progress last year but was put on pause in March.
A few points:
- The IC is a perfect platform for implementing a naming system both for the decentralized collaborative management & assignment of names and for providing a globally distributed tamper-proof root directory service;
- Every developer and many users of the IC know how awkward and deficient the current scheme of using the canister id as the service access name is. It’s like being stuck with using IP addresses as the only way of addressing web hosts and web services in web2;
- The above point applies just as much to internal IC canister addressing as it does to external requests into the IC from outside e.g. how would you address a load-balancing cluster of identical canisters distributed across multiple subnets in a distributed messaging protocol?
- Dfinity does need to take the lead on requesting a dedicated TLD such as “.icp”, it won’t fly if some IC community members submit a proposal to ICANN. The process could take a long while and expect roadblocks and delays along the way. So the sooner we organise and begin the submission process, the more likely a timely outcome.
@Kepler @domwoe can we get an update on any movement on the Working Group and any thoughts on this?