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I'm still not sure how a decentralized DNS would handle registration, if domains were free-for-all, what's to prevent squatters from ruining everything. What if

I'm still not sure how a decentralized DNS would handle registration, if domains were free-for-all, what's to prevent squatters from ruining everything. What if someone's domain is totally abandoned? Is there any way for someone else to take it? From what I understand from the dotp2p wiki, there's still going to be a registration party, OpenNIC (which is an existing alternative DNS root that runs .geek, .free, etc. I'm guessing it's a DHT but it would use some public key crypto so that each entry needs to be signed by OpenNIC. But this still leaves OpenNIC as a central point. It wouldn't be a point of failure, but it would prevent scaling if it was taken over.

Kadin 16y ago
I'm not sure what they're up to these days, but I remember when they got started (by some guys from K5, IIRC). It was an alternative root, and not any more decentralized in the technical sense than "regular" DNS. More responsive to users and democratic, but the structure was exactly the same. There were a bunch of other alternative roots that have taken on ICANN at one point or another, although it's been a long time since I've tried any of them. It strikes me as a doomed effort unless you can get some ISPs somewhere to buy in and point users towards your root rather than ICANN's. Most users aren't going to change their DNS settings (most probably don't know how), so it seems difficult to achieve any sort of critical mass of users.