p2p DNS

Now that the US is considering forcing pirate domain names out of the DNS, one of the founders of The Pirate Bay is floating the idea of a p2p DNS alternative.

Okay, wow. This is an incredibly terrible idea.

I'll start with the obvious objections:

• The DNS is meant to be authoritative
In a p2p system, you don't know who you can trust, because everybody else is just a peer. The DNS is completely useless if the results you get back aren't authoritative. Some people are proposing web-of-trust type solutions, or other idiocy. NO. Web-of-trust doesn't scale, and requires too much human maintenance to ever work. Even being able to compute some kind of transitive trust metric is an open research question, and then there's the so-far-intractable problem of picking a trust metric. Any answer you get from a p2p DNS system will be unreliable.
• The DNS is meant to be reliable
DNS is meant to be a transparent layer, when you're using the Internet. It's something that you just sort of expect to work, and bad stuff happens when it doesn't. And the thing about p2p systems is, it's actually pretty near impossible to make any guarantees at all about their behavior. I've actually read a lot of papers about building distributed storage systems. And you know what? Nobody's ever actually managed to get anything better than a relatively weak statistical guarantee about any property of a p2p storage system. For the DNS, that's simply not good enough.
• Performance
The DNS has pretty tight performance constraints, and p2p systems (for all their advantages) are extremely vulnerable to DoS attacks. It's pretty much inherent in their design - any p2p system will require a peer to have fairly complex communications with a lot of other untrusted peers. And, as many people have shown over the years, when you manage to take down the DNS with a (D)DoS attack, people tend to flip out.
• Secure decentralized systems are HARD
Look, it's not like it's impossible for random people on the Internet to band together and write a program. It's not even that difficult; open source has proven that. What is hard is getting random people together to solve a fundamentally hard problem in computer science. Let me put it this way. If a well-respected professor of computer science were to propose a p2p DNS system, I would treat it with heavy skepticism. If Peter Sunde proposes it, and expects the Internet hivemind to just sort of blast through all the hard problems by sheer virtue of wanting torrents, then I just laugh. (And then, if it looks like people are taking him seriously, I write a blog post like this.)

There are some people whose first reaction to any data management problem is to try to stick it in a magic DHT and forget about it. In many cases it works - see BitTorrent, for example. A DHT will work in any application where you don't especially need data to be reliable or trustworthy; it's a perfect fit for BitTorrent peer exchange, where reliability is optional because the DHT is only a backup for the real tracker, and trustworthiness doesn't matter because the peers aren't trusted in the first place. For the DNS, though, a DHT is exactly the wrong solution.

It may be possible, someday, to fully decentralize the DNS. To do it will take some fundamental advances in computer science, though, and Peter Sunde isn't going to be able to make that happen by rallying the pirates to his cause.