On July 9, 2026, the European Parliament reinstated mass scanning of private communications under Chat Control 1.0, despite a majority of voting MEPs, 314 against 276, actually opposing it. The rejection motion needed an absolute majority of 361 votes and fell 47 votes short. A law most elected representatives voted against became binding anyway, running until April 2028, with the more sweeping permanent version, Chat Control 2.0, still being negotiated for a possible return in September.
Most coverage of this story stops at outrage. What it should really prompt is a question: why is it structurally possible for a handful of institutions to reach almost everyone's private communications with a single regulation? The answer traces back to something most internet users never think about: naming. And it's exactly the problem Handshake was built to solve.
What Handshake Actually Is
Handshake is a decentralized, permissionless naming system, an alternative root for top-level domains that doesn't run through ICANN or any single registry operator. Instead of a central authority approving, leasing, and ultimately controlling who owns a TLD, ownership lives on a blockchain. Names are bid on, won at auction, and held directly by the owner's private keys, the same way a Bitcoin or Ethereum wallet holds funds.
There's no company sitting in the middle that can revoke a Handshake name, no registry that can be subpoenaed to hand over control, and no renewal fee owed to a gatekeeper who could simply decide not to renew it. If you own a Handshake TLD, you own it the way you own a piece of property, not the way you rent an apartment.
Why People Choose It
The reasons people move to Handshake tend to fall into a few consistent categories:
Ownership, not tenancy. Traditional domains are leased year to year from a registrar that answers to ICANN. Handshake names are owned outright, secured cryptographically, and cannot be quietly reassigned or seized through a policy change at a company you've never interacted with.
No single point of failure. ICANN's root zone is a centralized dependency for the entire traditional internet. Handshake's root is maintained by a decentralized network of validators, so there's no single office, court, or company whose decision can take a name offline everywhere at once.
Built-in identity, not just addressing. A Handshake name can function as more than a website address, it can anchor a self-sovereign identity: proof of ownership that isn't issued or revocable by a third party. That's a meaningfully different model from an email address or social handle that a platform can suspend at will.
Resistance to the exact failure mode Chat Control exposes. Regulations like Chat Control work because a small number of centralized naming and identity providers, Gmail, iCloud, the platforms sitting behind traditional DNS, can be compelled all at once. A namespace with no central operator to compel doesn't offer that same single point of leverage.
How People Actually Use It
In practice, adoption looks like builders and communities claiming a Handshake TLD, then running real infrastructure under it: websites, decentralized identity anchors, and increasingly, entire application ecosystems that resolve outside the traditional DNS root. Resolution is the other half of the equation, and it matters as much as ownership. Using a resolver like SkyInclude Browser to look up Handshake TLDs keeps that resolution path outside centralized DNS chokepoints too, so ownership on-chain isn't undermined by routing trust back through a conventional, compellable provider at the resolution step.
The Bigger Picture
Chat Control will keep making headlines because the underlying tension, centralized control versus individual autonomy over private communication, isn't going away. Handshake doesn't solve every part of that problem; it doesn't encrypt messages, and it isn't a substitute for tools built specifically for that job. What it does is remove one specific point of leverage that centralized regulation depends on: a namespace no single institution can seize, freeze, or hand over on demand. That's a narrower promise than "privacy," but it's a real one, and it's why more people are choosing to own their names instead of renting them.
NIHON — Handshake Infrastructure & Web3 Identity