The US Government has been cracking down on a number of websites that it claims contain “misbehaving” content including offering ways to access pirated content. This has been primarily done with the help of ICANN – the organization that is responsible for handling domain names. Thanks to the control that ICANN holds over individual domain names, the US government is noted to be easily able to shut off websites that it deems are unlawful.
Now, a number of internet enthusiasts – including the founders of the popular pro-piracy website, PirateBay are mulling over alternatives that will help website owners host such content deemed unlawful without having to worry about being hassled by government agencies. The group has proposed a new BitTorrent-like DNS system that will decentralize the DNS system over multiple computers that install an application and thereby make it impossible for ICANN to block content. The new system could run on a .p2p domain suffix instead of conventional TLDs like .com or .net.
The proposal is still in the development stages and it will be interesting to see how this moves forward.