Laws can change. I think it's well time to start thinking about how to organize the internet so that it routes around governments even more easily.

Eh. You don't have to "route around" this currently, just use a DNS resolver outside of the country that re-introduces domains which get taken out by oppressive governments.

Nobody wants to do this, though, as it would destroy the fabric of the internet as we know it or something. But a simpler method would just incur more government push back in an arms race around censorship. Do what the chinese [citizens] do: go covert.

This is actually an interesting idea to me. Forgive me for not being very knowledgeable about the DNS, so if somebody could correct me, I would appreciate it.

What happens if people start selectively paying attention to the ICANN root servers? For instance, my computer is set to use google's DNS. What happens if the DNS admins at google decide that they're going to just ignore the update from ICANN?

And what happens if there is a second-tier DNS that crops up specifically to thwart attempts at messing around with the records? (Honestly, domains being 'seized' should be treated like faulty equipment. If a drive starts bailing out, you replace it. To me, it sounds like the US gov't's ability to modify the DNS at their will is a click-of-death on the DNS)

First of all, let's be clear: the root servers are owned and operated by various entities in countries all around the world. The root zone file is the sole domain of the Department of Commerce of the United States of America. So you'd have to ignore all of them, and i'm not completely sure the US Government wouldn't force Google to apply the one correct root zone file (after all, Google is such a powerhouse you could complain of a monopoly of internet control or influence).

Potential legal issues aside, what you end up with is a New Internet. Of course routes all remain the same, but nobody refers to addresses or routes: they use host names. Thus you run a huge risk of networked applications just not working, which would affect everything from entertainment to commerce to government services and god knows what else (what if medical devices in hospitals needed to retrieve a firmware upgrade and couldn't connect to the right host?).

In practice there would be no technical hurdle to do this. It's simple to just configure your domain name server to include some records, leave out some records and change others. Some people do this if their ISP redirects failed lookups to some advertising-laden homepage, for example. But on a large scale, the modification of the naming system to one's personal tastes has broad-reaching negative consequences related to availability of hosts and the functional and legal consequences therein. On a personal scale (modifying only your own name server results), you get to connect to your poker site again. I prefer the latter solution. If operating systems just started including a simple GUI to modify their personal domain name caches we probably wouldn't need an alternate dns root.

This is precisely the goal of projects like p2p-dns[1] and AlterNIC[2]. It is mostly a chicken-and-egg problem of getting users to resolve non-standard TLDs, so that those non-standard TLDs are registered to things users actually care about, etc, etc.

[1] http://dot-p2p.org/ [2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AlterNIC

> just use a DNS resolver outside of the country that re-introduces domains which get taken out by oppressive governments.

But outside of which country? You'd have to read the local news for every country in the world that currently has them, every day, if not hourly.

In theory yes. In practice they move to Libya.

Indeed, extensions like .ME and .CO have a bright future, same for domain hacks (except for .US ones).

It hardly matters what the laws are when politicians wipe their asses with the constitution.