US seizes filesharing domains – p2p advocates consider distributed routing

The US Department of Homeland Security has stepped up efforts to contain what is considered illegal activity of sharing files across the net by seizing dozens of sites listing information related to file sharing.

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The Electronic Frontier Foundation and the Center for Democracy and Technology question whether the domain-name seizures are legal and are preparing to contest those actions.

Meanwhile, some are considering a move to use bittorrent – the contested p2p filesharing technology – to route around government controls of the connectivity between websites and users.

Torrentfreak reports that a new, decentralized and BitTorrent-powered DNS system is being considered to make routing impervious to the censorship efforts of any one country.

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.

“By creating a .p2p TLD that is totally decentralized and that does not rely on ICANN or any ISP’s DNS service, and by having this application mimic force-encrypted BitTorrent traffic, there will be a way to start combating DNS level based censoring like the new US proposals as well as those systems in use in countries around the world including China and Iran amongst others.”

See BitTorrent Based DNS To Counter US Domain Seizures to get a more complete rundown of where this may be directed.

And there is one more report on digitizor…


P2P-DNS is a community project that will free internet users from imperial control of DNS by ICANN. In order to prevent unjust prosecution or denial of service, P2P-DNS will operate as a distributed and less centralized service hosted by the users of DNS. Temporary substitutes, (as Alpha and Beta developments), are being made ready for deployment. A network with no centralized points of failure, (per the original design of the internet), remains our goal. P2P-DNS is developing rapidly.

2 Comments US seizes filesharing domains – p2p advocates consider distributed routing

  1. AvatarGregory Magarshak

    Watch them start banning ISPs then, or taxing their upstream links

    Still, distributed DNS is great — but we would then have to trust certificate authorities that grant certificates for a certain period of time. If the certificates never expired, then domain ownership would be forever. If they did expire, then the government could forbid a certificate issuing authority to reissue a certificate, but the effect would be much sower than banning dns.

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