The internet is built of services. One of the core services, and a major choke-point for control, is domain name resolution. There have been some alternates come and go, but one of the strongest has been OpenNIC, and they’ve just launched a new top level domain - .pirate

Despite the best efforts of Dutch lobby groups, and American entertainment cartels, the internet is a place where barriers don’t stay barriers for long.

Throw a roadblock out and a new route is recalculated. So it is with DNS. Add blocks in the ICANN systems, and people work their way around them.

The most common way until now has been a browser plugin, like MAFIAAFire, but alternate DNS systems are starting to become more popular. One of those, OpenNIC, is looking to capitalise on that with its new .pirate TLD (top level domain).

Registration takes just minutes, and then your new .pirate domain will be accessible by anyone using one of OpenNIC’s many DNS servers. That’s the big drawback at present.

However, the OpenNIC project is not just limited to .pirate (or dotPirate, as they’ve called it). They also have .geek, .oss (as in open source software) and .parody, among others.

The man behind the dotPirate project is Travis McCrea, Deputy Leader of the Canadian Pirate Party.

“While the world gets smaller and more connected through advancements of the Internet and web technology, every day our ability to have a free flow of information becomes more and more threatened by countries who wish to censor and control the communication platform which brings us all together,” McCrea told TorrentFreak.

“This is something that we cannot let happen, and why the dotPirate Foundation, … is proud to announce the launch of the new Top Level Domain (TLD) .pirate on the OpenNIC root system.”

To prevent abuse, some of the more popular domains have already been reserved (including torrentfreak.pirate and thepiratebay.pirate). As an extra bonus, people using blockaid.me for their DNS will already be able to access .pirate domains – they added support for OpenNIC over the weekend.

For those using OpenDNS, the provider announced a new service for Windows users last week. DNSCrypt, previously only available for Mac OSX and Linux, is a technology that encrypts all DNS traffic between an Internet user and the OpenDNS service. It can be downloaded here (update, no longer available).

.Pirate domains can be registered for free at dotpirate.me.