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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."
An alternative name registry service would do wonders to cripple the whole "internet censorship" bandwagon that has been going on recently. Blacklists? Rendered at the very least 2X as difficult to implement on a national scale, simply because the clients you are attempting to prevent from accessing content can reach that content by using the alternate name resolution service.
It would make measures like the Australian blacklist falderall all that much more difficult to actually pull off, and would render efforts like COICA similarly difficult.
Do it. Do it now.
No more of this Pansy DNS crap. Know your IP address like you know your phone number. Cut these clowns off at the legs. Free the net to the people who know how to use it and won't download viruses to their own computers thinking it's antivirus software... Take charge by taking responsibility from those who don't care and don't know!
It's the same part of me that, were I holding a cigarette lighter and a stick of dynamite, would be tempted to light the stick and throw it like they do in the movies, just to see what an exploding stick of dynamite really looks like. There's been so much greed and stupidity around the DNS, and it would be so *feasible* for someone to set up an independent alternative, I'd sort of like to see what it would look like when the existing system is blown to kingdom come.
However -- were I ever to be holding an actual stick of dynamite in my hands, the part of me that tends to say things like "this is not the optimum time to make an impulsive decision" would become quite strident. It's not that I would never, under any circumstance light a stick of dynamite and throw it. It's just that it being a really cool idea wouldn't be enough to make me try it until I'd thought through the consequences very, very carefully.
And as it stands, the DNS system does me more good than it has ever harmed me, and likewise for the vast majority of people who use it. It might be that giving *serious consideration* to a competitive system would do a lot of good, but a competition between two systems in which both survived would almost certainly be a bad thing.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
OpenNIC. While it mirrors the ICANN addresses, it also adds several new TLDs (.oss, .geek, .parody, even .gopher) which can be easily used. This is but one of the many alternative DNS roots, but it's the most popular, and it's democratically-run.