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Peter Sunde Wants To Create Alternative To ICANN
An anonymous reader writes "According to Peter Sunde's Twitter feed, he has been suspicious of ICANN for a long time. The non-profit corporation is tasked with managing both the IPv4 and IPv6 address spaces as well as handling the management of top-level domain name space including the operation of root nameservers. Sunde has lost a domain in the past because of the way ICANN acted. It was taken without any consultation on their part, instead the organization relied on information from recording industry group IFPI to change the domain ownership. But it seems for some reason his frustration has come to a head recently, and he has put a call out for help to create a competing root server."
The ROOT domain system is just that, it's trusted because well, if we didn't trust somebody at #1 this whole thing wouldn't work. You can't have a competing .com, .net, .org registry... sure, you could declare your own TLD and be root of that but, well, we don't trust you as much as we trust ICANN because, well, they've been root for a while now and haven't blown it that badly.
Messy. Question: which root do you ask for google.com? All of them? What if they reply with different addresses...which one's right? The fact that there aren't good answers to these questions is a big part of why we've tried to avoid splitting the DNS roots.
We'll call it UCANNT *rimshot*
Universal Co-op for Assigned Names, Numbers and Timeservers
Seriously though, I do think a backup system would be a good idea....It's needed in order to stop the growing attempts (that I think we're going to see a lot more of) to control, censor, filter, and police the internet....Due to the practicalities involved in how the system works, I am not certain how plausible it would be to have two competing systems while everything is working smoothly, and there are other points where the system could be messed with, but having a framework in place might not be a bad idea with the political realities we live in...
Skip the government part (though, honestly, I see no reason why they'll operate the way you think they will)...what about businesses? For example: Apple.com. There are several companies that can claim honest ownership of the "apple" name as a business title (apple computers, apple records, etc). If each of them buys the apple.com name in a different root, which one's "right"? All of them have reason to argue they are...do you expect users to have to surf to all of them one by one to find the "right" apple.com? Seriously? So now the users have to know about all possible DNS roots? yuk.
You seem to be assuming that the DNS with multiple roots will have very few name collisions except for government-caused ones...I don't think that's a safe assumption at all.
How about this? The Pirate Bay is too public to pull of a stunt like this, but some less known domains (like the ones seized a few moments ago) spurr less activism against it, so they can slowly roll it in and make it a norm. (like the antiterrorism bullshit going around)
Pulsed Media Seedboxes