I get that this looks very weird from the perspective of someone who’s been around since the early days of internet mass adoption. ICANN is basically a US-controlled bureaucracy, and bureaucracies are something that we’ve had for a long time and know the pros and cons of. And in fact ICANN has done a remarkably great job of what can only be described as a job from hell—coordinating the interests of a bajillion conflicting parties in one of the worlds most valuable digital assets.

That said, I hope you won’t write this off just because it looks weird. After all, the internet itself looked extremely weird for years (and arguably was at its most fun and interesting during that weird period.)

Handshake solves some real problems with the existing domain root zone system. Perhaps most interestingly to you, it trivially makes certificate pinning decentralized, and relieves us of the need to trust an increasingly obviously untrustworthy set of CAs. Further, it lets people hold domains anonymously, and creates something much more akin to actual ownership than the sort of “at the whim of the crown” perpetual renting that is available under ICANN.

Finally, handshake was designed from the ground up to be maximally compatible with the existing ICANN system. While we’ve identified serious problems with that system, we also have huge respect for it, and are well aware that for the near future Handshake’s usefulness will be very dependent on it being a “yes, and” rather than an “either, or”

Anyway, hopefully you can look past the novelty and weirdness of what we’re proposing and evaluate it substantively—your feedback would be immensely valuable