The ICANN’s 75th annual general meeting, that took place mid-September in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, was the theater of a confrontation between two visions of the future of domain names.

On the one side, the Ethereum Name Service (ENS) intends to become an alternative to the Domain Name System (DNS). For the proponents of this technology, domain names registrations must be decentralized and recorded on a blockchain, allowing to securely identify a user across the Internet thanks to cryptographic keys. And the idea seems appealing to many, as 600,000 users already registered 2.4 million names ending in “.eth” under the ENS scheme (which is not yet compatible with the official DNS).

On the other side, ICANN officials reminded that the ENS is lacking the rules and processes that allowed the development of a regulated and safe Internet. ICANN’s CTO John Crain, although qualifying the ENS technology as “really cool”, asked: “what kind of safeguards and norms are you putting in place regarding misbehavior and harm with these names?”. As of now, no such safeguard exists but for the ENS developers, it is a feature and not a bug, as the main idea behind the alternative system is to allow more freedom in TLDs management while avoiding any kind of censorship. Two visions, two worlds.

Full source:
https://domainincite.com/28270-its-icann-versus-the-blockchain-in-kuala-lumpur