The weird thing about this to me is that phone numbers always take you to the same phone, but domain names just involve me trusting some table I use to look things up.

The internet is deeply democratic, maybe anarchic -- whatever rules I want my machine to follow it follows. If people generally disagreed with this decision, a viral hosts file would roll it back.

(I don't think this so alarming a case that it will spawn a movement, but that response is available.)

.onion and namecoin and various others are a wholecloth attempt at this.

But it goes farther than hosts and alt roots. One of the unique properties of the internet is that if it gets overburdened with cruft people don't like, we can just build it from scratch on top of existing systems.

There are infinite namespaces. You could build a copy of the Internet that's the same but with no Facebook. You could build a copy of the internet where all domains are mapped right to left. You could build a copy of the internet that only hosts MUDs.

Adoption isn't guaranteed, or even likely, but maybe widespread adoption is part of the problem you're running from in the first place.

Here's to the dystopia of unregulatable and unusable internet fragmentation. Some pros, some cons.