Craaack!

Stand still and watch. You'll see the leading edge of the crack pass by you very quickly.

What am I referring to? How about the fracturing of the Internet?

InfoWorld has an article about a Dutch company (UnifiedRoot) standing up their own dns infrastructure, with the intent to run it in parallel to the ICANN managed namespace.

Call me a sadistic pessimist but this topic is going to be "interesting" (Chinese curse version) to watch and has a high entertainment potential. This sort of thing has been tried before and has taken some intriguing turns. (Hint: the proposed managers of the .XXX domain are the same people that used to sell you the domain under ALTERNIC, for less money.)

You'll need popcorn and some soda for this one folks! (I predict a lot of nasty politics, both external and internal.)

Update: Still think I'm kidding? How about this: the site recommends that DNS owners replace their hints file with one from UR. A quick look at the file reveals none of the normal DNS root servers are included. Yep, that's right, rather than the cooperation the web site touts, they want you to trust them implicitly. This should get interesting quickly.