Peter Sunde’s Solution to ICANN’s Domain Names Seizure: an Alternative P2P DNS

[DaBees-Knees]

http://www.p2pon.com/

A lot of ink has been spilled these days spilled over ICANN’s (Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers) seizing of domain names without a detailed explanation or a full trial which many link to the government trying a new method to stamp illegal file-sharing.

ICANN, the US-based organization managing the DNS root zone starts to appear dangerously empowered. Last year, the European Commissioner for Information Society and Media, Viviane Reding, (meanwhile appointed European Commissioner for Justice), brought up a very important the issue – that of ICANN being accountable solely to the US government.

“ICANN decisions affect millions of citizens and companies in the world. The courts of California alone are certainly not best placed to handle legal challenges originating in all continents of the world,” said Reding back in 2009.

Now, revolted like many others by the recent practice of ICANN (for example, along with The Department of Homeland Security it has recently seized the domain name of Torrent Finder, a torrent search engine returning results prompted also by Google) Pirate Bay co-founder Peter Sunde said it wants to take the DNS system from ICANN’s grabbing hands with a “new competing root-server” that will use P2P instead.

On Twitter he said “Hello all #isp of the world. We’re going to add a new competing root-server since we’re tired of #ICANN. Please contact me to help.”

According to Sunde, an alternative DNS root should be the starting point for the project followed by a new DNS system altogether.

On P2P DNS, a site dedicated to the discussions on the project he said: “The background for this project is that we want the internet to be uncensored! Having a centralised system that controls our information flow is not acceptable.”

“By using existing technology for de-centralisation together with already having a crew with skilled programmers, communicators and network specialists, an alternative system is not far away. We’re not going to re-invent the wheel, we’re going to build on existing technology as much as possible,” he adds.

The urge for such an alternative was dictated partly by the fact “Operation In Our Sites” launched by Immigration and Customs Enforcement, a division of the Department of Homeland Security resulted in the seizing of more than 91 domain names. Moreover, a large number of these sites are neither located in the US nor had the benefit of a fair full trial. A simple US warrant did the trick.

Sunde’s P2P DND proposal can be discussed in IRC here: irc://irc.efnet.nl:6667/dns-p2p

It seems America still thinks it rules the world and has the right to make decisions that have implications across national borders, and can do so without any redress. 

[Bluey_412]

well, the USA is very wrong about that, as Wikileaks has lately shown.

Altho it should be said, perhaps the rule is more the aim of Corporate America rather than Uncle Sam