Alternative Roots

Alternative Root Servers or the Alternative Domain Servers provides users with alternative gTLDs not currently available in ICANN space. The control of the official Internet is mostly in the hands of the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN). IANA, a department of ICANN, has full control over the ‘root’ server, which is a file on a computer that is kept at Herndon, Virginia. This file works as the official list of domain names on the Internet.

The DNS is a hierarchical system designed to allow humans to use text strings to access content or services in place of IP addresses on a global information network. Operating systems have been distributed for decades with the listing of default DNS servers to use as the authoritative place to obtain an answer when searching for a TLD. There are 13 Root Server Operators in that file, and they comprise the Internet's main DNS root. In addition to the Internet's main DNS root working in agreement with ICANN, several organizations operate Alternative Root Servers (often referred to as "alt roots"). Each alternative root has its own set of root nameservers and its own set of TLDs.

Alternative Root or Registry Projects

Alternative Root Servers have been in existence since 1995, when several groups of Internet users found out that they didn’t have choices other than .com, .org], and so on. Alt roots can in general be divided into two groups; those run for idealistic or ideological reasons, and those run as profit-making enterprises.

• Open Root Server Network (ORSN)
• Open Root Server Confederation (ORSC)
• OpenNIC Site charter
• AlterNIC (ANIC)(stopped in 1997)
• eDNS (stopped in 1998??)
• Iperdome (stopped in 1999) see the announcement
• .WEB IODesign
• Root
• name.space
• New.Net / Vendare
• UnifiedRoot
• dotLOVE - endorsed and supported by Dr. Masaru Emoto (of What the Bleep? fame)
• Cesidian Root Alternate Link
• iDNS i-DNS.net International
• BORN : Business Oriented Root Network
• ONIC : The OpenNIC Project
• CINICS : Common Interest Network Information Center Society (Jefsey Morsin)
• INIAC
• Public-Root
• UNIDT
• NBA
• UCDA
• Handshake
• Ethereum
• Unstoppable
• .chn
• Russian National Domain Name System

Reasons Alternative Root Projects Have Developed

1. In 2005, Paul Vixie, a member of the ISC F-Root team and involved in maintaining BIND, a popular open-source implementation of DNS, suggested to RSSAC that ICANN create an alternate root zone so that the technical community could add features like internationalized domain names, IPv6, and DNSSEC without disrupting older DNS behavior.

Theories on Why Alternative Root Projects Fail

• Paul Vixie explains that “any set of DNS root name servers that serves any DNS root zone that did not come from IANA is an ‘alternate root’...[M]any attempts to fork the IANA name space and offer non-standard top level domains...has failed. Often that failure followed public ridicule by me. I think alternate roots of the ‘name space fork’ variety are a terrible idea for the global Internet, although I recognize the need for this kind of name space augmentation inside many enterprise networks...Vibrant competition among Internet name spaces is bad for all of us—bad for business, bad for freedom of expression, bad for national and personal security."

On-Going Issues

Fragmentation

Concerns have been raised over how alternative roots could lead to the technical, governmental, and commercial splintering of the Internet.

Name Collision

Conflicts can occur in user experience and functionality when there are identical TLDs that do not match in their delegation, which is why some form of centralized coordination is important in adding names to roots, such as we see with ICANN. The .biz TLD created by Pacific Root was in operation before ICANN proposed running .biz, and at least one of the alternative root servers resolves .biz to Pacific Root's. There are .biz domain names that exist in different roots and point to different IP addresses. The possibility of such conflicts, and their potential for destabilizing the Internet, is the main source of controversy surrounding alt roots.

Lack of governance

Especially in decentralized systems such as that making use of Blockchain. However, the coordination required to encompass many voices and views and build consensus is glacial in contrast to the pace of pioneering and innovation in unregulated spaces.

Functionality

Only people could view sites or send emails to people using domains in these alternative TLDs. This could be improved through the use of special helper applications, or if a custom configuration was made to their computer, or to their nameservers, or a custom configuration at an ISP upstream in the DNS hierarchy. None of these solutions were as comprehensive as being listed in the default nameservers that are seen when an operating system starts. Whilst technically trivial to set up, actually running a reliable root server network, in the long run, is a serious undertaking, requiring multiple servers to be kept running 24/7 in geographically diverse locations. During the dot-com boom, some alt-root providers believed that there were substantial profits to be made from providing alternative top-level domains. Only a small proportion of ISPs actually use any of the zones served by alt-root operators, generally sticking to the ICANN-specified root servers. This in turn led to the commercial failure of several alternative DNS root providers.

ICANN's stance

In 2012, ICANN conveyed its opposition to alternative roots in "ICP-3: A Unique, Authoritative Root for the DNS" . This document incorporates, by reference, "RFC2826: IAB Technical Comment on the Unique DNS Root" .

In November 2021, ICANN published a blog post reiterating buyer beware when it comes to alternative root servers.

Internet Assigned Numbers Authority

Top-Level Domain

Internet Service Provider

Internet Architecture Board