After dumping thousands of secret US diplomatic cables in the public domain last week, WikiLeaks ended up losing its web hosting company – twice – and its wikileaks.org web domain to boot as providers got cold feet about its content. But a plan being hatched by fellow travellers in the file-sharing community may shield the controversial data dumper from such takedowns in future.
It all started with a tweet on 28 November: “Hello all ISPs of the world. We’re going to add a new competing root-server since we’re tired of ICANN. Please contact me to help.”
The file-sharers believe that ICANN, which controls the internet’s domain name system (DNS), takes down web domains at the whim of politicians and industry bosses, if they are considered to infringe the law. The DNS is effectively a phone book for the net, a look-up table which converts a website’s URL into a machine-readable IP address that locates the relevant server and brings users their requested page. The DNS comprises 13 large registry computers, called root servers, dotted around the world. Each holds an identical copy of the internet’s master look-up table. If a domain is deemed illegal, ICANN can render it useless by simply steering traffic away from it.
Sunde has lost at least one domain this way, seeing it taken over by music trade body the International Federation of the Phonographic Industry and, with others, faces a huge fine and prison for running The Pirate Bay. The wikileaks.org domain name was lost last week when the provider, EveryDNS, terminated it.
So activists, led by Sunde, hope to construct an alternative registry: one that will initially work like existing systems, but which in the long run will become a decentralised, peer-to-peer (P2P) system in which volunteers each run a portion of a DNS on their own computers. By breaking up the internet phone book and hosting it in pieces, they will strip ICANN of its power. Any domain it tries to take away will still be accessible on the alternative registry.
This missive, complaining about the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers, was from Peter Sunde, an anti-copyright activist based in Sweden and one of the founders of The Pirate Bay website, which tracks the locations of copyrighted movie and music BitTorrent files. It instantly lit a flame among file-sharers. “That small tweet turned into a lot of interest,” Sunde blogged two days later. “We haven’t organised yet, but are trying to… we want the internet to be uncensored. Having a centralised system that controls our information flow is not acceptable.”
Also from “BitTorrent Based DNS To Counter US Domain Seizures”:
The domain seizures by the United States authorities in recent days and upcoming legislation that could make similar takeovers even easier in the future, have inspired a group of enthusiasts to come up with a new, decentralized and BitTorrent-powered DNS system. This system will exchange DNS information through peer-to-peer transfers and will work with a new .p2p domain extension.
In a direct response to the domain seizures by US authorities during the last few days, a group of established enthusiasts have started working on a DNS system that can’t be touched by any governmental institution.
Ironically, considering the seizure of the Torrent-Finder meta-search engine domain, the new DNS system will be partly powered by BitTorrent.
In recent months, global anti-piracy efforts have increasingly focused on seizing domains of allegedly infringing sites. In the United States the proposed COICA bill is explicitly aimed at increasing the government’s censorship powers, but seizing a domain name is already quite easy, as illustrated by ICE and Department of Justice actions last weekend and earlier this year.
For governments it is apparently quite easy to take over the DNS entries of domains, not least because several top level domains are managed by US-based corporations such as VeriSign, who work closely together with the US Department of Commerce. According to some, this setup is a threat to the open internet.
To limit the power governments have over domain names, a group of enthusiasts has started working on a revolutionary system that can not be influenced by a government institution, or taken down by pulling the plug on a central server. Instead, it is distributed by the people, with help from a BitTorrent-based application that people install on their computer.
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