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Alternative Technologies as Alternative Institutions: The Case of the Domain Name System

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The Turn to Infrastructure in Internet Governance

Part of the book series: Information Technology and Global Governance ((ITGG))

Abstract

Late 2010, WikiLeaks makes thousands of secret US diplomatic cables public, losing a few days later its web hosting company and the wikileaks. org domain. Discussions about a “new competing root-server,” able to rival the one administered by the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN), soon start populating the Web, prompted by well-known Internet “anarchist” Peter Sunde. “The heart of DNS problems aren’t (sic) with ICANN. It’s with the governments and companies which can control ICANN. The system … is centralized,” he remarks (“ICANN Alternative,” 2015). An alternative domain name registry is envisaged, a decentralized, peer-to-peer (P2P) system in which volunteer users would each run a portion of the Domain Name System (DNS) on their own computers, so that any domain that would be made temporarily inaccessible, because of seizures or blockings, may still be accessible on the alternative registry. Instead of simply adding a number of DNS options to the ones already accepted and administrated by ICANN, this project would supersede the main DNS governance institution—in favor of a distributed, user infrastructure-based model.

An earlier version of this chapter was presented at the IAMCR conference in Dublin, Ireland, June 25–29, 2013 and was the recipient of the 2013 “Best Paper Award” of its Communication Policy & Technology Section. The primary source material for this chapter is made of in-depth qualitative interviews conducted with technical developers—working as academics and/or in the private sector—and Internet governance specialists, most of whom have expressed the wish to remain anonymous (thus, I have decided not to explicitly name the non-anonymous minority, as well). Interviews have been conducted in Washington, DC, New York and Boston, and remotely in Italy and France, in the September 2012–April 2013 period.

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Authors

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Francesca Musiani Derrick L. Cogburn Laura DeNardis Nanette S. Levinson

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© 2016 Francesca Musiani

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Musiani, F. (2016). Alternative Technologies as Alternative Institutions: The Case of the Domain Name System. In: Musiani, F., Cogburn, D.L., DeNardis, L., Levinson, N.S. (eds) The Turn to Infrastructure in Internet Governance. Information Technology and Global Governance. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137483591_4

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