As governments and corporations look to exert more control over the internet the issue of avoiding internet censorship and promoting freedom of speech has become a central issue in shaping our internet for the future. To ensure that information is both free and uncensored it is imperative that political and economical forces are not able to unfairly modify the internet architecture for their own purposes. At the centre of this is issue is the Domain Name Service (DNS).
DNS is a directory of computers and their associated names, much like a ‘phone book. When you type an address in to your browser (for example, www.google.co.uk) your computer asks the DNS service to find the IP address that is associated with this address so your computer knows where to connect to to get the page you have requested. The DNS is a hierachical structure, made up of a number of Top Level Domains (TLDs). These TLDs are the right-most part of the adrress, like the .com, .net, .co.uk etc that we all know.
Anyone can run a DNS server. However, to resolve the domains we all know, your server needs to talk to the top-level or root servers. These servers are run by corporations and are distributed around the world. The overall administration of the DNS and IP addressing falls to an organisation called Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN). ICANN is a non-profit organisation which was set up by the US Federal Government to control DNS, which was previously within US Federal remit. The US federal government has retained influence over ICANN, not least because ICANN is operated within US jurisdiction. ICANN charges a large amount of money for the privilege of setting up a TLD or being a reseller for domains within a TLD, which used to be free when the internet was first created.
DNS can also be used to track your internet access. This is because every site you visit generates a DNS request, which can be logged, leaving a record of all of the hosts on the internet that you connect to. DNS can also be used to censor your access; if a domain is removed or blocked from DNS, you cannot resolve the domain name to the IP address on which it is hosted, thus stopping access to the domain. Censorship using DNS blocking has already been implemented in many countries.
However, there is a solution to this invasion of your privacy. Alternate DNS root systems can be used which do not have such censorship. This also provide an added bonus: free to register domains and TLDs, thus making DNS free, open and globally distributed, as it was always intended to be.
One such alternative root provider is opennic. Opennic allows you to resolve a host of new TLDs whilst still allowing access to the existing, ICANN administered domains. It’s easy to use, it just takes a simple configuration change on your PC to benefit. Click this link for more discussion on why this is a good idea and to find out how to make the simple change.
So there we are. Object to censorship, control and artificial costs. Join me in using opennic now and keep internet freedom alive.