Cult
of the Dead Cow
Electronic Disturbance Theatre
Independent media centres
Pirate radio and TV
Hacktivism
The creation of alternate top-level domains (for example .indy instead of .com) is part of a practice that has in effect generated an Internet outside the official Internet, the control of the latter being largely held by the US government-sanction private organization, the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN). ICANN’s authority over the official Internet stems from its control over the “root” server, a file of computer data kept in Herndon, Virginia, that acts as the official list of domain names on the World Wide Web. From this file, thirteen computers known as the legacy root name servers get their information. In turn, virtually every computer on the Internet gets its data from one of these root servers or a copy of its data that has been cached downstream.
Alternate top-level domains operate by reproducing the information in the official
root server in its entirety and adding additional unsanctioned addresses to
the list. If Internet users reconfigure their browsers to point towards an alternate
root server a whole other Internet becomes accessible as well as that which
is under ICANN’s control. There are currently at least 15 alternative
roots, the operators of which range from outlaw libertarian free marketers to
noncommercial collectives like OpenNIC. All but Name.Space have begun to cooperate
by banding together under two shared alternative root networks: the Open Root
Server Confederation (ORSC) and PacificRoot. Data on the use of alternate namespaces
is difficult to come by and far from conclusive, yet estimates for the percentage
of users that have access to alternate TLDs range between 5 and 30 percent.
Technically there is virtually no limit to the amount of TLDs that could function
simultaneously.
Alternate root servers have existed since around 1995, when groups of Internet users became fed up with the limited choices available (.com, .org, etc) and realized a way that they could harness their technical know-how to extend the existing namespace. In August 1996, Paul Garrin’s Name.Space generated an initial list of 30 new top-level domains with suffixes such as .art, .video, .museum, and .cam. It then invited the Internet population at large to come up with their own choices. 1998, regulatory control over the DNS – and thus to a great extent over the structure of this communicative space – as opposed to virtually all of its media predecessors, was handed to ICANN. The organization has opposed alternate TLDs since its inception on the grounds that they lead to instability. In 2001 ICANN created seven new top-level domains. Some of them were already operational in the alternate DNS: .museum, .pro, and .info, for example, were already a part of Name.Space’s offerings.
OpenNIC
An alternate DNS project that is a user owned and controlled Network Information
Center, offering a “democratic, non-national, alternative to the traditional
Top-Level Domain registries”
http://www.opennic.unrated.net/
Open Root Server Confederation (ORSC)
A Network of alternate TLDs
http://www.open-rsc.org/
MediaFilter
name.space operator Paul Garrin’s personal website.
http://www.mediafilter.org/