Free your DNS

Unable to reach websites like www.saab or disney world? Your computer is probably configured to browse only part of the Internet. Enable your computer to see the whole internet! Free your DNS!

What is DNS (Domain Name Service)?

A short introduction to some basics is neccessary.

The Internet is, as you may know, a network of computers all connected together. Each computer is identified by an unique number called an IP address. If a computer connects to another computer on the Internet, it's using its IP address to establish the connection. An IP address is composed of 32 bits (a bit is either zero or one), so a valid IP number would be:

00001010 00000000 00000000 00000001

To make it more readable these zeros and ones are calculated backed into decimal numbers, which in this case results to:

10.0.0.1

Remembering the IP address of every site on the Internet would be hard task, so that's why DNS was invented. With DNS, every site can be registered to have a linguistical name (like "google.com") which is then mapped to an IP address. This name is called a 'domain name'. Thanks to DNS you can remember a website by its company name or its purpose instead of having to remember a mysterious series of numbers.

The Power Of DNS is in the hands of ICANN

Now, this mapping of domain names is controlled to prevent any bastard to have a server running with the same name as another more known website. Imagine yourself browsing to "www.google.com" and ending up half the time at some porn site, just because there are two computers having named themselves "www.google.com".

To prevent this from happening, an organisation called ICANN (which is install by the USA government) has the authority to enable or disable domain names for use. ICANN has decided for instance that each domain name has an extension which gives away some information on the site hosted: Each country has its own extension while some categories are defined as well. Below are shown some of these "Top Level Domains" (TLDs).

.be  - Belgium
.nl  - Netherlands
.com - Commercial 
.gov - Governmental
.edu - Educational

Sounds like a perfect world?

No, it sounds more like dictatorship! One organization, under control of the government of the most powerful country in the world, controls who can have a domain name and decides whether you should pay for it or not.

Shortage

The Internet has been growing a lot these years and now there is a shortage of IP addresses and domain names. To enable more choice for domain names, ICANN has loosened up some its rules and has enabled more domain name extensions, added more "Top Level Domains" (TLD).

.tv
.info
.museum
.biz

Other standards

While ICANN defines domain names (to be more precise: TLDs) for use on the 'common' Internet, there is no reason why you can't use your own domain name on your internal network (LAN). Your network could be called "is.great" and your internal webserver could be called "zorro.is.great" while you're still able to browse to the public Internet (for instance "www.google.nl").

The same applies to the public Internet. There are other organizations besides ICANN which 'authorize' use of other domain names (for instance ".www" as in "my.website.www"), while they are not supported by ICANN. Still, some 'authorization' is required to prevent conflicts in domain names.

Because of the existence of these other standards the Internet is a little bigger as you might see it in normal life. Basically you're missing out if you're only using ICANNs DNS rules.

Seeing the rest

To see the rest of the Internet you should change the DNS server (nameserver) of your Internet settings into the IP address of a DNS server that supports the ICANN namebase as well as other "roots". Check the website http://newroot.com/upgrade.htm to see how to change your computer settings.

There are several alternative root domains out there. For instance the Inclusive Name Space combines the ICANN Root and the Public Root.

Weblinks

For more information about other DNS root-domains:
NewRoot
Public Root

When using these new DNS settings you can browse to:
http://www.saab/
http://disney.world/
http://www.kia/
http://the.earth/