Slashdot Mirror
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.
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!
Can't he just ask the Chinese to redirect the domain to his server?
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...
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.
Why continue with the concept of name ownership at all? It should be technically impossible to own a name, in the same way that it should be impossible to monopolize ideas.
Let people and entities use whatever name they want; the remaining problem is to verify that you are talking to the right host, but you should need to do that anyway. Invariably, any sort of central authority can and will be subverted. What is necessary is some other means of conveying trust, wether that is a web of trust, or some other out of band option.
This is what I believe we should strive for. The distributed naming system and trust system are orthogonal problems, but need to integrate in a convenient way. So, it is still a hard problem, just not in the same way.
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
This is already in the works at; http://dot-p2p.org/index.php?title=Main_Page .p2p will soon be incorporated into OpenNIC.