With the Combating Online Infringement and Counterfeits Act (COICA) threatening to promote DNS blacklisting and the US government going on recent domain seizing sprees, some internet users are trying to create new ways to combat these government actions.
Dot-P2P, a new initiative to create a free decentralized open DNS system, has launched in recent days and intends to do just that.
According to the Wiki that Dot-P2P founders have created to launch and promote the project, the intention is to “create an application that runs as a service and hooks into the hosts DNS system to catch all requests to the .p2p TLD while passing all other request cleanly through. Requests for the .p2p TLD will be redirected to a locally hosted DNS database.”
The main page for the project goes on to explain that, “By creating a .p2p TLD that is totally decentralized and that does not rely on ICANN or any ISP’s DNS service, and by having this application mimic force-encrypted BitTorrent traffic, there will be a way to start combating DNS level based censoring like the new US proposals as well as those systems in use in countries around the world including China and Iran amongst others.”
Peter Sunde, a former spokesman for The Pirate Bay, has been embracing and promoting the Dot-P2P project and spoke to TorrentFreak about his reasons for doing so.
“For me it’s mostly to scare back. To show that if they try anything, we have weapons of making it harder for them to abuse it. If they then back down, we win,” Sunde explained.
According to a Dot-P2P project team member, a beta version of their client will be released shortly though the project only began a few days ago.
While I admire this new open DNS initiative that Sunde and others are supporting, I find it to be quite unfortunate that it has become necessary to take such drastic measures to preserve a free and open internet. The fact that we are driven to fight government regulation by creating new systems out of their reach is unsettling. It’s only a matter of time until they catch onto the new system and it becomes necessary to create the next alternative. I’m not as optimistic as Sunde is in believing that there is a chance that they will back down, and if they do I don’t think that it will happen anytime soon.
