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Due to ICANN's past behaviour, this is already being done. See OpenNIC, AlterNIC, and The Pacific Root. Now, if more ISP's would support them ...

To really apply negative reinforcement to Verisign, the ISPs need to block not just sitefinder.verisign.com, but *.verisign.com, and drop the Verisign controlled root servers from the root hints file.

Errr... But how would you find the IP address of PepsiCo's nameserver? This sounds like a boot strapping problem.

having more than one internet naming athority could potentially cause quite a bit of havoc as packets streams get split between two physical destinations

I agree, there would be havoc, but I have no problem with alternate DNS systems existing. If the advantages are great enough, the competing system will win and the lesser will die out.

I may not agree that Alternic and the other "alternative DNS" systems out there are the better ones, but by their existence they are not depriving anyone of anything.

The two I know of are OpenNIC and AlterNIC, but there are probably many more.

Everytime I see one of these stories, I wonder why people don't use alternic. OK, not so much why they don't, just why geeks in position haven't altered their DNS's to see alternic sites. Slow, subtle and once accepted and working, people would be pissed when they couldn't reach sites they were used to seeing. I always thought that the internet was supposed to have strength due to decentralization. Oh yeah, us government needs to control everything around the world. shudder.

Control of the root domain is important, but not as important as this book would suggest, because a) most Internet users aren't sophisticated enough to change their nameservers to, say, those of Alternic, and b) there are (I'm guessing) a lot more domain names than IP addresses.

For instance: I run a server that hosts five websites -- five different domains. If I decide that it's time to Screw the Man (tm), and that I'm not going to be able to get the really rebel domain name that I want 'cos of InterNic, and therefore I'm going to have to just pass around a link to the IP address, that leaves less namespace usable on that server.

I've lost a convenient label for this site, one that can be easily remembered. While that's a setback, and not a small one, it's not a showstopper. (God almighty...first namespace, now showstopper...somebody stop me!) If my task is Educating The Masses (also tm), all I need is to convince someone to put up a link on a website that does have a memorable domain name; at that point, Joe User can click it, or make a bookmark, or email it, or be emailed it, or remember the path of links it took to get there. Less convenient, but not a killer. And in any case, a link from a memorable site would be half the battle anyway in getting the word out; I'm sure print/spoken advertising isn't everything in getting people to go to a site.

What is a showstopper is, as you say, explicit censorship of the contents for reasons of copyright, or security, or litigation. This worries me a lot more than whether or not I can register yahhooo.com.

The difference lies in the fact that you can choose what OS/Kernel/distribution you want to use, but you can't choose not to use ICANN if you want to use the Internet.

Oh Really? Are you sure?

In short, what would it take to revoke ICANN's powers entirely in favor of something more fair and impartial?.

OpenNIC is still around, and has been for two years. It was proposed on K5 1 Jun 2000, and was operational soon thereafter. A month later, it was serving 4 alternate TLDs. Today, it serves 6 with a specific new one pending, and talks of serving out several language-related TLDs (like the ccTLDs, but for languages). Others have been around since before us, and they're still reasonably active. There's also AlterNIC, PacRoot, ORSC, ORSN, and others.

Most, if not all, alternative roots peer the majority of legacy TLDs (i.e., those of ICANN), including the new ones. We (OpenNIC) have peering agreements with AlterNIC and PacRoot, and we're working on others as well.

So, what exactly are you talking about? Geeks haven't abandoned alternative roots. We are quite active.

You *are* free to do this now. There are several alternative roots, or you are free to build your own - just like the early days of the internet when there was no centralized control.

• OpenNIC
• AlterNIC
• The Pacific Root

If you run your own DNS server (even if just for your own use), give them a try.

Then you'll have access to many more TLD's. If enough people support AlterNIC and "enhanced DNS" it will make ICANN irrelevant.

People are actually running their own nameservers outside of ICANN in a quite ordered way - there's a host of .ocean, .dot, .children, and similar top level domains out there - all you need to do is use one of those nameservers. Go take a look at OpenNIC - through which you can also use the top level domains from PacificRoot and AlterNIC.

The least you could have done is check your links.

I personally like OpenNIC, but there are even more like Pacific Root and commercial ones like New.Net

OpenNIC
Open RSC
AlterNIC
Tiny Org
NameSpace

(Links courtesy of Lionfire.)

I never understood why any one organization had control of this stuff in the first place. Microsoft has full control over Windows and its official "components", and in a way, ICANN is doing the same thing. Look up monopoly in the dictionary (from http://www.m-w.com) 1 : exclusive ownership through legal privilege, command of supply, or concerted action 2 : exclusive possession or control 3 : a commodity controlled by one party 4 : one that has a monopoly By these definitions of monopoly, that is exactly what ICANN has, is a monopoly on all names on the internet. However, we CAN do something. Don't forget AlterNIC...just switch your DNS's to theirs. I am. --Strangel aka Jim Morris--

No one forces anyone to use ICANN for DNS resolving. I can forsee some large ISP, say AOL, offering its own internal TLDs (.biz, .fun, .kids, etc.) This would not impact the net outside of AOL. They could, though, allow anyone to point to their DNS servers. If enough do, we will have a new controller of DNS. Then, if they become corrupt, people will move again. There is a chouce here, people. Don't like ICANN? Don't use ICANN. Use ALTERNIC. There are maky others out there too.

But let me point out that URL should be www.alternic.org, not .net as was erroneously posted.

Did ICANN ever resolve the issue that there was a pre-existing .biz domain which the (IIRC) Alternic people were supporting?

According to their list of TLDs, Alternic does not support a .biz domain. I think you want biztld.com, which also has a blurb about ICANN's announcment (not a happy one).

For the Technologicaly Impared see www.alternic.org also for another example see www.OpenNIC.unrated.net for an alternative to the two more traditional network information centers.

It good to see the courts actualy deciding in favor of something logical for a change three cheers from me at least

Especially since places like OpenNIC and AlterNIC don't exist.

Well according to the well known port list, 340 is unassigned, let's use that. And I'm sure alternic could probably be a good starting point for stanards-based DNS2

In this case, I would tell the ACLU to back down. The internet does not need defending. The internet needs to defend itself, and if it does not, it deserves to die. I would not care to see it any other way. We either fight for it or give it up to someone else who is fighting for it.

Fixing this problem is very simple, and it has been said by others so many times. But, the ACLU can not fix it. The users of this network must fix it. Use different DNS servers.

Go check out http://alternic.org/. Put 208.130.10.122 and 208.130.10.123 in your DNS list.

Damn, Alternic even has a howto, though it needs work;

http://alternic.org/howto/

What excuse do you have now lazy ass?

You are giving ICANN their power by using them. If you do not like them, knock it off!

So, what am I doing to help this situation? I would like to try and talk my superiors into adding some alternative DNS servers in our network for our customers. This may yet happen after some time, but someone has to speak up or it will never happen.

In this case, I would tell the ACLU to back down. The internet does not need defending. The internet needs to defend itself, and if it does not, it deserves to die. I would not care to see it any other way. We either fight for it or give it up to someone else who is fighting for it.

Fixing this problem is very simple, and it has been said by others so many times. But, the ACLU can not fix it. The users of this network must fix it. Use different DNS servers.

Go check out http://alternic.org/. Put 208.130.10.122 and 208.130.10.123 in your DNS list.

Damn, Alternic even has a howto, though it needs work;

http://alternic.org/howto/

What excuse do you have now lazy ass?

You are giving ICANN their power by using them. If you do not like them, knock it off!

So, what am I doing to help this situation? I would like to try and talk my superiors into adding some alternative DNS servers in our network for our customers. This may yet happen after some time, but someone has to speak up or it will never happen.

Until then, I think the best way is to open it up to everyone and get the registries to allow mass voting on what new TLDs are added. WIPO can handle the problems with trademarks.

Another point I feel worth mentioning, is that the problem also lies with the fact that WE are not taking advantage of the alternative DNS systems out there. If we make a mass migration over to alternative DNS systems, ICANN will lose its clout. This should send a message to any future organization or government that would like to manage DNS. Check out and support:

Open DNS Technologies

AlterNIC

ADNS

Open Root Server Confederation

Name.Space

There's more too.

Chris

Open DNS Technologies, Inc.

In fact, several such alternative root registries already exist. (See, for example Alternic, Name.Space, OpenNIC, and eDNS.) The problem is that there's not a critical mass of people converting to any one of them. These systems also threaten the uniqueness (if the same TLDs are set up on competing root servers), universality (the same URL should resolve to the same site for everyone, and everyone should be able to access all URLs), and technical stability of the DNS namespace. DNS cache leakage is a compounding factor.

The DNS is not like open source software; you can't fork it and make a version of it that you like better, and let people chose which one they like best. It is (at the moment) a shared global resource. Sure, lots of people grumble about ICANN's handling of the expansion process. But the community of name server administrators and owners has consistently recoginized that the dangers of fragmenting the global name space outweigh the likely benefits of doing so.

--Beland

I decided to try out opennic. It's very easy to make use of them. If you're not running your own nameserver, it's just a matter of putting a couple of their public dns server addresses in /etc/resolv.conf (in linux or bsd), or in windows putting them under network configuration, I believe. They have the instructions on their site for various operating systems.

If you are running a nameserver, you only have to make a small change to named.conf to get it to point at their root servers rather than ICANN's. It also is compatible with the "official" dns, so you will still be able to resolve all the standard addresses as before. Opennic also cooperates with other alternative standards, such as alternic, so you can check out, for example, .porn or .xxx websites (not that I would).

The system is still in its youth, but I think it's very exciting.

The people at name.space have been trying at this for a while. Same with AlterNIC, but they ruined their reputation a while back. None of it is free, but preventing domain squatters going nuts is a good thing.

The FSF need merely convince RedHat, SuSE, Debian &al to ship Linux, ahem, GNU/Linux distributions with named (BIND) enabled by default and the appropriate delegation entry in the /etc/named.conf file. After all, all the computers I administrate have the pointers to the AlterNIC's root servers for the domains they serve (such as .PORN).

Remember: the power lies not with they who operate the root servers but with they who call them root servers.

Ha, ha, only serious.

1.Court systems (in whichever country you are in) still exert juristiction. Moving to Sealand isn't going to help. While you (the new DNS people) may not have problems, people using your service still have to face liability in their country of origin. As long as the court systems seems to think that Domain Names are trademarkable, well, we're screwed.

There's nothing technical that can be done about that. However, simply not disableing a domain name UNTIL a court order is issued would be an improvement over what we have now. Ideally, the court order should go to the domain holder and not the DNS provider. That can be done if the DNS provider maintains that the registrant owns (or purports to own) the name and the provider simply propogates it as a service to the registrant.

2.You'd have to get the big players (most of the major ISPs) to go along. For legal reasons (see #1), this will never happen. So, if the people that provide 90% of the internet users capacity don't use you, what's the point?

Even windows allows manual selection of DNS. Nothing requires you to use the DNS provided by your ISP (I don't). We don't need a sweeping revolution, it can be one netizen at a time.

3.As to this, there is currently AlterNIC. They don't have many of the problems we associate with the current system, but guess how successful they've been?

You've heard of them, I've heard of them, everyone reading this has heard of them... Their TLDs resolve for me. Again, one at a time.

4.DNS requires a controlling entity. Distributed control isn't really a good idea. (Distributed operations are, though).

Why not? As long as a mechanism exists to prevent cheating it should be no problem. The only authority needed is private agreements between the participants, which could perhaps be informal. I need no legal authority to claim that www.microsoft.com = 207.46.130.149. You are free to take my word for it or not.

A key to avoiding trouble in that area is to stay away from the current TLDs. Let ICANN and the rest have .com etc.

alternic its been around for a while

While a noble idea, there are several major reasons why you would never be able to get it accepted:

1. Court systems (in whichever country you are in) still exert juristiction. Moving to Sealand isn't going to help. While you (the new DNS people) may not have problems, people using your service still have to face liability in their country of origin. As long as the court systems seems to think that Domain Names are trademarkable, well, we're screwed.
2. You'd have to get the big players (most of the major ISPs) to go along. For legal reasons (see #1), this will never happen. So, if the people that provide 90% of the internet users capacity don't use you, what's the point?
3. As to this, there is currently AlterNIC. They don't have many of the problems we associate with the current system, but guess how successful they've been?
4. DNS requires a controlling entity. Distributed control isn't really a good idea. (Distributed operations are, though). The controlling entity needs to have some method for enforcing it's decisions, and whoops, that means it needs to derive authority from some legal method. Right now, I'm voting for a U.N.-sponsored organization that then delegates to national orgs. Honestly, I think international treaty is about the only way to go here.

In the end, however, you fall into the same trap virtually everyone does when attempting to "Reform" the DNS system. They make the assumption that names have connotation. That is, that there is some meaning to the name www.microsoft.com other than it's easier to remember than 207.46.130.149. The DNS system was designed, and SHOULD REMAIN simply a pneumonic (sp?) that makes life easier for machine identification. What we've loaded onto the DNS system is content location, something it's completely unsuitable for.

Fundamentally, I should NOT be typing in "www.microsoft.com" in IE if I want to look for Windows 98 crap. I should type in "Microsoft Windows 98". There should be no end-user mapping between content and DNS name. Content should be divorced from DNS completely, in the manner that DNS is divorced from IPs. Meta-searching and content discovery/cataloging need to be avanced to the point where honestly, the end-user should NEVER KNOW ABOUT URLs. Does then end-user know about IP addresses nowdays? No. Neither should they need to know about DNS names.

We need to fix cataloging and searching first, then the DNS problem will go away.

-Erik

Those Alternic people have been around for as long as I can remember. All this stuff is quite useless. Why do some people, once they understand DNS operation, feel the urge to offer some alternative thing? Can you imagine 10 additional, non-internic, TLDs from 5 registries, without a centrally maintained root.hints file? Sounds like a bad thing(TM) to me.

.fx has a strange story. In short, it doesn't exist, but it almost did. The FX country code is one of these weird things in the ISO standard: it's supposed to stand for metropolitan France. Someone tried to persuade Postel (the late IANA) to let him have it because of the fascist way that the .fr domain is administrated; ultimately, he failed, though.

Similarly, some friends of mine are currently setting up the fx.* Usenet hierarchy because of problems with fr.* (they're looking for more feeds, btw, so if someone is interested...).

Of course, the AlterNIC has some more strange TLDs, for example .porn or .xxx (I have special entries in my /etc/named.conf file to redirect such domains to the AlterNIC root servers not that I use them, but as a protest against the ICANN foolishness).

Has anyone looked at AlterNIC lately.

In fact, there are many root nameservers; one for each country out there (.de, .uk, .ie, .au, etc) and the US government and military do their own thing too.

http://nic.gov
http://nic.mil

I'm assuming that either NSI points requests to them, or local nameservers know to ask them (based on the top-level of the request). So this kind of this is already happening, it's just that alternic.org is not in the 'official list' or whatever. Maybe ICANN has something to do with it.

Alternic.org has been around a long time. The problem is, you need to use their nameserver, since your local (ISP) nameserver won't be checking their DNS registry. So other people would have a hard time finding your site.

I mean sure, you'd lose some compatibility, but just like Alternic, it personal/private protocols could definitely have their places and uses. Build an encrypted protocol, or a protocol which could be encrypted/signed with a pgp key and the world will love you. Keep your communications private and your own. Nobody owns you, nobody owns your communcations, nobody owns your thoughts, and nobody should own your entire means of communications.