I would like to raise an important topic, which might cause a lot of problems for ENS in the future. At the moment there are domains like nazi.eth, nigger.eth, niger.eth, kidsporno.eth, childporno.eth, srpskasuka.eth and many others with immoral, racist, xenophobic words and child pornography on the service.
Getting into a scandal associated with racism or child pornography will lead to major problems and losses for the project. The case of Bored Ape Yacht Club is an example, where people had to do a lot of research and pay attention to every detail to prove racism. In our case, everything is even simpler, the service allows and provides the opportunity to register a domain kidsporno.eth or nazi.eth.
I see a solution to this problem as follows → Restrict access to domains (which are not yet registered) for example - kidsporno.eth. Just do not allow such a word combination. What to do with already registered ENS, let’s decide here. It seems to me that this message is more important than the detection of a serious bug, because the story in the future, associated with a domain can strongly undermine the project and trust to it. Let’s make this project better together! Thank you!
I knew this would come up eventually. People love chanting “censorship resistant” and “free speech,” but apparently haven’t fully considered what that entails.
Frontend websites/dapps can choose not to display such names. Looks like Rarible already has delisted it for example. ENS Labs, ENS.Vision, and others could do the same thing for their ENS manager apps if they wanted to.
But the core protocol should never have any kind of disallowlist like that. It should be completely neutral.
Also, once somebody owns a name, nobody in the entire world (no, not even the DAO) can forcefully take that name away. It’s simply not possible at the protocol layer – the eth node is completely locked, and there are zero administrative controls on the .eth Registrar that would allow names to be transferred without owner consent. Not to mention that would be against the first article in the ENS DAO Constitution.
The most that the DAO could ever do for existing names is disallow them to be renewed or set very high renewal costs, via a new ETHRegistrarController. But that would be telegraphed well in advance, and any holders of existing names would be able to extend their names for 1000 years or whatever at current registration fees, before that could go into effect.
So for this particular name you linked, if anyone was thinking of forcefully transferring/burning it from the current owner, then sorry, it cannot be done. (As long as the owner keeps the name expiry extended.)
Of course I can tell you already knew all of the above, because you make the distinction between not-yet-registered and already-registered names.
Now, perhaps the DAO could vote to purchase/register such names and burn them, as they see fit. Either by purchasing them from a marketplace, or registering expired names that are in the temporary premium auction phase. This is something that has been discussed before, with the “ENS Fairy” thing that caused an uproar a little while ago.
Essentially the DAO votes to give funding to the Ecosystem Working Group. Then the stewards of that working group (three people) have the power to use that funding to purchase/register names and give them to ENS Fairy (controlled by two people from ENS Labs). Any funds that get used on the temporary premium auction flow right back into the DAO treasury.
The intent is to grow ENS adoption, by securing names for influential brands and giving it to them in the future when they’re ready. But it could also be used to register-and-burn such “unsavory” names as well.
Whether that should be done is another discussion we can have. I don’t think it’s a good use of DAO resources personally. And I’d prefer to see ENS remain as credibly neutral as possible.
We can add a notice ( warning ) for those who already have such a domain and when renewing it will be given to them, which will indicate that the renewal of this domain will increase several times, that it will not be profitable to renew it. What about domains that are still available for registration, if you register such a domain, the user will receive a warning ( warning ) and the price of domain registration ( for example kidsporno.eth ) will be very high, it must discourage the registration of such domains. The problem is that the people who register such domains are not looking for good intentions. A healthy person would not want a kidsporno.eth or childporno.eth domain. At the time of registration of such domains we must do everything we can to prevent this domain from being registered.
In the future, people can do bad things under such domains, which can severely damage the reputation of ENS DAO and the project as a whole.
As @serenae so eloquently put, any front-end that interacts with the ENS protocol can make their own decisions about what info they display or censor, but the ENS protocol itself is decentralized, trustless, permissionless, and is agnostic in regards to cultural or emotional responses to specific strings.
Some of those strings offend me very, very, much and yes, even reference illegal behaviors, in my current cultural context. But, trustless and permissionless systems have tradeoffs.
I think as a community we need to push back hard on ideas like this when they propose protocol level changes.
All of those strings are offensive (other than Niger) - couldn’t agree more about pushing back hard on any protocol level changes that involve censorship in a decentralized eco system…there could not be a more slippery slope in the wrong direction for any entity in a trustless environment. It should be pointed out that a person likely wouldn’t want to own / possess a highly offensive name in their wallet - as it is quite the definition of a hot potato.
Please buy a dotcom domain if you want more censorship, and even they don’t restrict such domains. ICANN seems to be much more progressive in terms of free speech preservation that this DAO lot, so maybe that is bad advice if you like controlling other people.
Secondly, Nazism is not seen as taboo anymore. In fact, Ethereum itself donated tens of millions to neo-Nazi Banderite causes last year in support of the war effort in Ukraine. Vitalik himself was on board with it, and Nick has a Ukraine flag avatar on twitter. Who is to say certain racial epithets won’t come back in vogue in the future as well? From all of the closemindedness on this forum, it wouldn’t surprise me one bit if racism makes a big comeback.
Finally, an ENS steward awarded a grant to a claimed Russian draft dodger at 5x the market rate out of pity or a desire to virtue signal in favor of the Ukraine regime.
I am of Ukrainian descent and have worked with and in support of the ADL, a group that owns many of the .com slurs and epithets. If you really are bothered by racism, child sex abuse, and other things…you can buy the domains, or make a foundation to gobble them up. That is the correct play, not policing ever changing words in a decentralized system.
Edit: Now I read .eth of OP. He’s likely Ukrainian, so should be in agreement the damage Ethereum has caused to our land in funding the worst people known to mankind. Nothing seems to have changed since the pogroms era. I speak English because of the continued popularity of Nazism and worshipping of Khmelnytsky, Petliura, and Bandera!
