ICANN is Not the Enemy: How to Befriend the Open Source Standards Bodies

Transcript

[music] [music] All right. So, first of all, uh my name is James. I'm head of growth at ENS Labs. And quick question here uh for the few people we have in the audience. Who knows what I can stands for? Does anyone? I can is the internet corporation for assigned names and numbers. Think of it as like a sort of global nonprofit United Nations for deciding how do resolves and which uh top level domain should exist. Um so this is a talk about

kind of well I wanted to have a little bit of a philosophical hook and I I guess I'm going to get into it with some Jacqu Dereda. He uh born in uh Algeria, French. He died in 2004. So he was mostly writing in the 60s. People call him a postmodernist, but in in effect he actually hated that designation and hated being called a postmodernist. But one of his like biggest ideas was the rejection of binaries. So when you think about binaries uh you know he wrote a lot of political philosophy books and one of his big ideas was when the state has to decide what is a citizen you also have to create the binary of the the sort of inverse of it. So the opposite of a citizen is a foreigner meaning and

and he was largely focused on the power dynamic between these binaries. So he would say like you know a citizen has no power if there's no concept of a foreigner that lacks power. He also said, you know, the state has no power if there if there's no way to determine what is public and what is private. And really what he does is deconstruct these binaries. And what I want to actually talk about right now is some of the biggest binaries that we talk about when we think about crypto, tradi, mainstream adoption. Um, welcome everyone. And I'm talking about derida if you if you guys care to join the so when I first joined crypto in 2017 um what was really actually appealing to

me coming from a person who was working on like US China relations was this idea of maybe having an opportunity to kind of tear down the state tear down institutions deconstruct the world disintermediate power decentralize everything that was kind of the theme at consensus at the Ethereum Foundation at DevCons. Um, but when I actually think about the teachings of Dereda, what you're actually doing when you say we're going to deconstruct everything, we're going to tear down, we're going to decentralize everything, is you're actually giving equal power to the opposite of that. So, if you have decentralization, you have to then put centralization in the same sentence.

Basically, it's it's the whole world of politics is saying, you know, if you're not for this, you're anti- this, but you're actually working in their own um in their own definitions, in their own binaries. Um so, just as part of my intro, I just need to share like, you know, there we'll skip this you guys. We have a couple minutes left. Um, so basically by defining ourselves against the opposition, you ended up focusing a lot of the on the incumbents and what we were saying often times is that if we're going to tear down the existing financial system, you have to keep mentioning the financial system and that actually doesn't work when you are trying to build a technology that is

going to be world changing and everyone can use. Um, so let me just give a few quick examples now that you guys know what the Internet uh Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers is. There's been a lot of attempts at creating web three domains where you can just create a new route and see who adopts it. But the problem is is that it won't actually work with the root of the internet that I manages. Um and so we actually ENS years ago took a very different path and it treated the DNS route as secanked and something to integrate rather than work around. Um another good example is the global legal identifier foundation. So this was created in 2008 after Lehman Brothers collapsed. Basically when they were trying to do all of this cleanup

they realized oh wait there's no way to actually understand which business is which. Let's create a registry of numbers of businesses. And so when you think about ENS actually it should work with something like this. If you're creating an onchain business and you have to identify yourselves onchain we shouldn't just use an ENS name a you should actually use something that works with the existing uh systems that almost the whole world is now required to use after uh the Leman brothers crash. So kind of as a summary, the only way that Ethereum does earn it earn its place as core financial infrastructure or even information infrastructure is by working with these open source standards bodies.

And I'll leave you with uh a couple lessons. If you are working in a space in which you have to interact with um basically non-crypto open source standards bodies, speak their language. So onchain identity can be something like a verifiable company ID. If you say something like permissionless, say everyone can build on it without a single company or contract owning it and then don't avoid the risks. Um, you know, for example, for I can their whole risk is the stability of the global namespace. For the global legal identifier foundation, their thing is knowing who your counterparty is. Um, so and for banks, it's about compliance. So don't forget to lead with the risks that they care about, not just the ones that

we think about in crypto. And then finally, don't overpromise. There are things that have massively improved on Ethereum over the years, but you know, you have to be honest with name collisions are real. Don't overpromise what we can do and what our technology can do and how fast it is. So, um, I'll leave you with a final Darede quote. Oh, my friends, there is no friends. So, the opposite of the enemy is a friend you agree with. It's someone you build with despite having very different interests. Thank you. >> [applause] >> I I I think I ran out of time to have any questions.

>> No, that's all good. We got a little bit of time left. We can get a few questions in there. But thank you for that talk. It's like me trying to explain crypto to my parents. [laughter and gasps] Anyone in the audience got some questions for James? >> Sorry about the glasses. [laughter] >> Okay. So I I I guess I guess um what I'm wondering with with ENS it seems like you kind you kind of worked hard not to tread on the toes of I can right and and then we've ended up in a position where we we aren't really doing like um for example um core DNS stuff right like blockchain resolution of IP addresses

and then I've just come from you know a talk about how Calfi get hacked by their registar Do do you think you've been handicapped at all by the by being so careful not to tread on the toes of of the incumbents in ANS? >> I mean there is an interesting kind of legal gray area of so ETH itself is this I mean technically it's reserved for the country of Ethiopia. It's you know a CCTLD a country code TLD. Um but no country actually uses their threeletter CCTLD. So Ethiopia is Eetet. Um, then there's been interesting workarounds. So there's limo.link. You know, you can go on jamesback.eth.limmo and find my personal blog. Um, but then

I think maybe I don't want to like foreclose future opportunities. We uh announced that we applied forens so that we actually are a part and have a you know a place at the table with IAN and you know Nick Johnson founder of ENS he's a part of some technical committees within IAN. So I guess what you're trying to, you know, I wouldn't foreclose the future opportunities of doing some really interesting things natively on chain. And I mean just also a reminder, I don't think a lot of people know that you can actually take your DNS domain and import it into ENS.

And so you could have a com resolve as a blockchain address. I don't know if that's exactly your your point though. I mean, >> yeah, >> you can, but it's still, >> right? Right. >> Yeah. [music] >> [music]