Decentralising the internet (Image: Jonathan Nackstrand/Getty)

After dumping thousands of secret US diplomatic cables in the public domain last week, WikiLeaks ended up losing its web hosting company – twice – and its wikileaks.org web domain to boot as providers got cold feet about its content. But a plan being hatched by fellow travellers in the file-sharing community may shield the controversial data dumper from such takedowns in future.

It all started with a tweet on 28 November: “Hello all ISPs of the world. We’re going to add a new competing root-server since we’re tired of ICANN. Please contact me to help.”

This missive, complaining about the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers, was from Peter Sunde, an anti-copyright activist based in Sweden and one of the founders of The Pirate Bay website, which tracks the locations of copyrighted movie and music BitTorrent files. It instantly lit a flame among file-sharers. “That small tweet turned into a lot of interest,” Sunde blogged two days later. “We haven’t organised yet, but are trying to… we want the internet to be uncensored. Having a centralised system that controls our information flow is not acceptable.”


Taken down on a whim

What’s their beef? The file-sharers believe that ICANN, which controls the internet’s domain name system (DNS), takes down web domains at the whim of politicians and industry bosses, if they are considered to infringe the law. The DNS is effectively a phone book for the net, a look-up table which converts a website’s URL into a machine-readable IP address that locates the relevant server and brings users their requested page. The DNS comprises 13 large registry computers, called root servers, dotted around the world. Each holds an identical copy of the internet’s master look-up table. If a domain is deemed illegal, ICANN can render it useless by simply steering traffic away from it.

Sunde has lost at least one domain this way, seeing it taken over by music trade body the International Federation of the Phonographic Industry and, with others, faces a huge fine and prison for running The Pirate Bay. The wikileaks.org domain name was lost last week when the provider, EveryDNS, terminated it.

So activists, led by Sunde, hope to construct an alternative registry: one that will initially work like existing systems, but which in the long run will become a decentralised, peer-to-peer (P2P) system in which volunteers each run a portion of a DNS on their own computers. By breaking up the internet phone book and hosting it in pieces, they will strip ICANN of its power. Any domain it tries to take away will still be accessible on the alternative registry.

Eminently feasible

The exercise that Sunde and his colleagues are undertaking – if it ever gets off the ground – is reminiscent of Search Wikia, an attempt to make a distributed ad-free search engine to rival Google. Run by Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales, the site aimed to be open and honest about its search algorithm, so that advertisers couldn’t exploit loopholes in it for unfair advantage. But with its index spread around a few thousand volunteer servers, it could not reach anything like Google’s scale or speed, and folded its tent in April 2009.

Oddly, Wikia – the parent company of Wikipedia – owns the domain names wikileaks.net, wikileaks.com and wikileaks.us – for reasons not yet clear. They expire in January.

Ben Laurie, a London-based security consultant and a former technical adviser to WikiLeaks, thinks the alternative internet idea is eminently feasible. “Technically, this is all pretty easy. What they have put together already is really quite professional. Persuading everybody to use it is going to be the difficult bit. Why should people trust it more than ICANN’s root server?”

He thinks WikiLeaks is the kind of premium content that could convince people to take it up. If it works, a sort of “shadow internet” could form, one in which legal action against counterfeiters and copyright scofflaws would be nearly impossible.

Whose internet?

Still, ICANN does a lot of work managing the 280 top level domains – such as .com and .org plus the 248 national suffixes – and the frequent changes made to them. “A lot of people think ICANN is a waste of time, and I often agree, but it does some important things these people will not be able to,” says Laurie.

Indeed. The back story to all this is that Sunde and colleagues Carl Lundstrom and Fredrik Neij, on 26 November lost an appeal in the Swedish courts and face a £4.2 million fine – and prison terms varying from four to 10 months – for running the Pirate Bay. They are now making a final appeal to Sweden’s Supreme Court.

Laurie feels ICANN’s proprietorial attitude to the net needs challenging. He recalls a manager from one of ICANN’s political overseers, the US Department of Commerce, collaring him at an Internet Engineering Task Force meeting. “I’ve come to find out what you are doing with my internet,” she said. That’s an attitude the P2P DNS crowd will surely be hoping to change.