I mean, these days you have the DAO. So on the positive side, it's not 4 of 7 people anymore. But on the negative side, it's theoretically anyone, depending on how badly they messed up the code, concentration of ownership, and other economic/social factors.

You also have the problems that it's all resolved through a centralized service, in practice. So if Infura gets a court order to NXDOMAIN thepiratebay.eth, that's pretty much good night.

I would love to see a more detailed analysis of "if Infura gets a court order to NXDOMAIN thepiratebay.eth that's pretty much good night".

Also want to read an analysis of how to take down ENS DAO with a flash loan of $ENS. Would need to be a higher level of detail than the parent article

If you look at the DAO voting process, it’s same 4-7 people having majority of voting tokens.

That's because ENS was set up as a delegated voting system. If one of those representatives starts losing their favor with the community, people can switch their delegates to someone else.

Can or will?

> This includes possibly seeking to register .ETH through the normal ICANN process”

This is a non-starter anyway. The new gTLD program has not been open for applications since 2012. Even if it were to reopen tomorrow, ICANN is highly unlikely to approve a gTLD that does not operate under a standard registry/registrar model. I'm not certain that they'd even be willing to consider it.

For enough money, they might. If I'm not mistaken, the "community treasury" has 50% of all ENS. This comes to 0.5 * 100MM = 50MM ENS. At current exchange rates (assuming no slippage), that comes to $17.92 * 50,000,000 = $896,000,000.

I'm assuming ICANN approved all this gTLD nonsense because they like the money. This naturally raises the question: how much money would they need to approve this? And is it more or less than $0.9 billion dollars?

Money isn't the issue. If it were, other parties (like the various claimants to .app) would have b̶r̶i̶b̶e̶d̶ convinced ICANN to favor their applications by now. The real issue is simply that ICANN is a highly bureaucratic organization; they don't do anything quickly. They only published a report on the outcome of the 2012 gTLD offering last year.

There are private TLDs like .google that don't use the registry/registrar model, right?

They do, actually. Charleston Road Registry (an entity owned by Google which also operates other TLDs like .APP, .DOG, and .FOO) is the registry; Google is the sole registrar. As far as I'm aware, all of the private TLDs operate on some variant of this model.

But it goes beyond just having those two distinct entities -- any ICANN TLD is expected to follow a set of operating policies (e.g. domain registration, renewal, transfer, expiry, and redemption; dispute resolution; WHOIS verification... etc) which is fundamentally incompatible with ENS.

> This is 100% correct.

I think you forgot to divide by s.