HIP-13: Hedera Name Service

[kenthejr]

This discussion is designated as the discussions-to target of hip-13. Use this thread to further develop the HIP and move it through to its final lifecycle state.

[H-Bart]

I am proposing the following amendments to the HIP that would make HNS a more direct competitor to existing decentralised domain services and in particular Handshake:

1. The Hedera Council should blacklist all existing TLDs registered with ICANN
2. Instead of auctioning off SLDs under the TLD .hh all TLDs other than those blacklisted can be auctioned off by the Hedera network in a procedure similar to that already described.
3. To facilitate a more gradual release of TLDs into the market(in addition to the already proposed hard cap of active TLD auctions) the mechanism described below can be implemented:
   • A TLD may be registered if hash(TLD)%N ≥ i, where N is the time before all TLDs are registrable and i(0-indexed) is the discrete unit of time(measured in the same unit as N) that has elapsed since TLD registration started.
   • Take for example the TLD .hbar:

TLD = '.hbar'
N = 52 # measured in weeks
available_from = hash(TLD)%N # measured in the same unit as N(in this case weeks)
# returns 8, therefore the TLD ".hbar" can be registered starting from week 8(0-indexed) OR week 9(1-indexed)

4. TLD owners can register SLDs under their respective TLDs. These SLDs are not tied in ownership to a TLD in the same way subdomains are tied to an SLD(as described in the existing HIP), hence SLDs can be registered by a TLD owner but ownership of an SLD is not tied to its TLD owner, this allows for an entire marketplace whereby TLD owners can register and sell/auction off SLDs.
5. The Hedera Council should whitelist the SLDs for the top 100,000 sites listed on Alexa and reserve their corresponding TLDs. Whitelisted domain owners can be onboarded onto HNS as previously described and claim their reserved TLDs. For example the TLD .hedera will be reserved for the domain owner of hedera.com who on proving ownership of the aforementioned domain to the Hedera network will be afforded ownership of the TLD .hedera on HNS.