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

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.

© 2016 Francesca Musiani

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