DNS is decentralized about as well as TLDs are decentralized... they're not. You'd specifically have to run your own DNS to make it decentralized and use other upstream providers that allow the use of open TLDs.
What is your definition of decentralized? There's no one system which controls of the DNS records or makes changes to them, and the root TLDs are run by an international consortium which has limited ability to force changes. Even if the U.S. government gets in a shooting war with Russia, there's no plausible outcome where .ru records come under the control of the U.S. government or vice versa.
That's about as decentralized as a real system gets while still being usable.
Decentralization usually requires some incentive to get people to run it and no single entity on charge of it. Since most ISPs incentive is to redirect failed entries incorrectly and DNS root servers are only reporting centralized TLD providers that require payment for registration, no it isn't decentralized by any standard compared to the decentralization of IPFS using Bitcoin.
Uh, this is DNS. Bitcoin has a similar but far more expensive mechanism for social consent but more importantly it also doesn’t have equivalent functionality for a global namespace. That’s the underlying problem here: the purpose of the DNS system is to map human-meaningful names to addresses and that requires a mechanism for guaranteeing uniqueness and dealing with abuse. Bitcoin can’t do that and things like ENS have the usual problems handling abuse.
What definition are you using for decentralized? Note that I didn’t say anything about a privileged central role - as you learn about how decentralized systems like DNS, email, the web, etc. work note how often that means something like selecting the work of a third-party aligned with your views (e.g. email server operators use black lists run following policies they agree with).
This is why, for example, ICANN doesn’t have the ability to arbitrarily transfer domains — their operation of the root servers is limited to the terms agreed to, and if they tried to abuse their technical access they’d be replaced by an alt root. The Russian government has already done this for political reasons and it’s not especially hard to do given a reason.
I'm talking about the structure of the technology.
What you are replying with is a political science style defense of the idea of centralized power.
Your argument is like the political science idea of the benevolent dictator, who is vulnerable to coup unless they can keep the factions happy.
Political science also has the idea that the institutional democracy can be more resilient than that to such simple attacks as a coup by a would-be dictator.
When I'm talking about decentralized I'm saying that the technology doesn't even have a place for the benevolent dictator to exist. Not that the node is constrained politically. The node is not even there.
Centralization is easy to build and provides easy "solutions" to problems like abuse. Centralization simply reduces all problems to the one problem of choosing the center. Like you say: "selecting the work of a third-party aligned with your views."
Centralization works, insofar as it does, because the human beings controlling the center have to maintain some kind of political alliance in outside society to maintain their spot.
Fair enough, I guess, for some purposes. But it's like CAP theorem, sometimes you want a different set of tradeoffs for a different purpose. Not all systems work by choosing a center. Some systems fragment, some unify by non-political (mathematical) means.
> When I'm talking about decentralized I'm saying that the technology doesn't even have a place for the benevolent dictator to exist. Not that the node is constrained politically. The node is not even there.
This is why I asked your definition and alternatives because that isn’t possible or desirable for a system like DNS, or almost anything else. At some point you need a query for your bank to go to the intended party, not a scammer, and that means that you usually end up relying on third-parties. A decentralized in the standard definition system like DNS handles the root issue using social consensus which makes abuse obvious and limited to the period before an untrustworthy party is no longer consulted.
You mean decentralized, right? It only affects people who trust Russian ISPs. There isn’t a magical technical fix for what a sovereign authority can do within its jurisdiction.
It affects users of their DNS servers, which isn't the same as people who trust them.
And it's because of the centralized structure of DNS technology that it's possible for Russian sovereign orders to propagate DNS information to those users.
Just like the political science benevolent dictator replaced in a coup, retaining the previously-built chain of command.
