Everyone should be able to freely register their own domain.name.
UCAN Too! disrupts traditional commercial domain registration. The fully-qualified domain.name is the commodity — not a TLD that must be approved by a bureaucracy. Free (or tiny ISP cost) names for every human, operated by participating ISPs, secured by staking and open rules.
It does not replace the ICANN root. It builds beside it so that every person can control their own name identity without waiting for the next decade-long TLD expansion round.
“The last round of TLD expansion cost nearly a quarter million to participate. ICANN grossed over $300 million — and for what? They perform no actual technical steps. They are like a court of law deciding who gets new real estate.”
The problem
The legacy model established a small group of 13 root servers. It was a tough job for mainframes at the core of the Internet when it started. The people and organizations controlling these things have entrenched their own existence and have little motivation to find a better way. They simply monetize in more ways.
ICANN is in the midst of the second wave of TLD expansion. The prior wave was in 2012. It may take another decade before they do it again. Our goal is to preempt that and do it better, faster, cheaper — in fact for free, or a tiny cost decided by your ISP.
While ICANN charges ~$227k for the opportunity to run a TLD, you can get a free domain.name.
The objective
Fully decentralize and democratize domains. Allow everyone to control their own name identity. We believe .com was meant for a commercial Internet, but every human is entitled to their own identity or alias as a full domain.name. The fully-qualified domain.name is the commodity; it does not require a TLD root designation.
How it works (technical overview)
DNS already understands domain names
DNS servers natively handle domain names. TLD designations are not necessary. The UCAN FQDN is stored as a basic key-value pair that augments a traditional DNS server query.
A UCAN DNS server first attempts to resolve through traditional/IANA TLDs. For non-existing TLDs, the UCAN NS database is inspected.
UCAN NS Database
Simply key-value pairs following typical NS domain delegation: domain.name → NS record + TTL. The UCAN DNS server has read-only access and obeys TTL expiration exactly as traditional DNS does.
Scale: if 8 billion people registered a domain.name, the database would be roughly that many records (or ~16B with two NS records). Feasible with proper DNS software.
Who registers the names
In traditional TLDs, registrars obtain domains and record them in a single registry company per TLD. In UCAN, ISPs are the entities that can register the domain.name. There is one blockchain registry for all domain.names.
The DB writer is the UPP Worker (UCAN Provisioning Protocol) — analogous to EPP, but between ISPs and the UDNS server.
Humanity and KYC
ISPs are expected to obtain UCAN domains only upon the request of their active customers. Humanity verification (Worldcoin-style proof of personhood or approved oAuth) plus reverse-DNS stake anchors the claim.
Who this is for
UCAN is not a product. It is not a company. It is not a token.
It is an open protocol proposal intended to foster discussion, experimentation, implementation, and eventual standardization.
Start with the claims model or the conflict escalation levels. Or get involved in the non-profit that will steward the process.