1) Censorship is a very real problem on the clearnet. 2) Users ultimately decide what root zones to trust or directly what nicks map to what public keys. 3) T

1) Censorship is a very real problem on the clearnet. 2) Users ultimately decide what root zones to trust or directly what nicks map to what public keys. 3) This is fundamentally the same class of attack as MITM/Evil Maid, it is impossible to completely defend against this. Existing DNS/PKI does not fix this either, It merely put everyone's eggs in one basked and hands the problem off to rent-seeking intermediaries (CA's, Registrars, etc.) which serve no purpose other than racketeering. The purpose is not to make MITM impossible, just harder. Users will familiarize themselves with the risks of the system just as they do with Tor/I2P addresses. Most users already receive phishing messages telling them to "Go to microsoft.signin.net to reset your password!" so they already know not to trust domains unless they trust the entity giving them the domain - that should be a sign that the existing DNS isn't socially expected to authenticate identities before letting them own a domain. When you want to go to a company's website, do you use a search engine or just go to <company_name>.com and hope for the best? If so, do you expect every company to squat every TLD with their name? 5) LOL! Yeah... encrypts your DNS request directly to cloudflare or <intermediary>'s servers. GNS fixes this. 6) The centralization of the existing internet infrastructure in general is something that should be avoided. I for one, do not mind if it makes your job more difficult. It is not just critical for global security but also for personal liberty on the internet. The centralization of crap like DNS serves as a major hurdle for average users and affects the use of the internet as a free-speech tool, even if you might not realize it. How do you get a domain? You have to pay a registrar, which means you need a credit card. How does a user host their own blog/email/whatever without jumping through all these hoops? They don't, they just use twitter or gmail or something and accept corporate censorship. DNS is a wedge towards "web 2.0" social media and thus censorship. I wonder what Arab Spring would look like if everyone had easy access to a secure, private, decentralized internet instead of the what we have today where users are funneled into a handful of monopolies for corporate gain and social control. A functional internet probably makes your job harder because the majority of the software industry is built on rent-seeking business that offers (service-based) solutions to systematic artificial problems like that of DNS, PKI, IP.