On Mon, Apr 02, 2007 at 09:23:32AM +0100, michael.dillon@bt.com <michael.dillon@bt.com> wrote a message of 46 lines which said:
It is probably time to start looking at alternative naming systems. For instance, we have a much better understanding of P2P technology these days and a P2P mesh could serve as the top level finder in a naming system rather than having a fixed set of roots.
The only serious (?) proposal I've seen until now, CoDoNS (http://www.cs.cornell.edu/people/egs/beehive/codons.php), uses DNSSEC, so it has the same dependency on the US government.
better understanding of webs of trust that we could apply to such a mesh.
You mix up *resolution* of names (which could be done by a P2P mesh like CoDoNS, replacing the root name servers) and *registration* of names, which have to be hierarchical if you want to preserve unicity of names. And this is the important point of control (the root name servers are not controlled by the US government, unlike the registration root). So, you've not solved the problem.