Its getting more and more news attention and rightfully so: US to hand over "control" of the internet to the UN in October. Now, as a libertarian, the government controlling anything bothers me. However, the government handing something over to the UN, that just causes nausea.
I just read this great article on Steemit about this very topic. The author did a great job of breaking down what ICANN and IANA are and how the Domain Name System Root works. Basically, that's the reason we get the Steemit website when we type steemit.com into our web browser.
The system as we know it is very centralized. Now, if I had to choose between the US or the UN controlling that, I would choose the US. If I could have my way entirely, and not be faced with that choice, I would choose a solution that IS NOT government controlled or affiliated in any way. Luckily, there exists such a solution!!
Namecoin was the first altcoin fork from Bitcoin. The purpose of Namecoin, as stated on their website, is to prevent the world from becoming a surveillance state by supporting free speech and opposing censorship. Namecoin brought about the ".bit DNS" system, which is a DECENTRALIZED alternative to the DNS Root mentioned above. The nitty-gritty technical details can be found at bit.namecoin.org.
By using Dot-Bit to identify a website with a .bit domain name, several things are accomplished. For one, no company or government can track my visits since the Dot-Bit DNS generates no traffic when a lookup is done. Censorship resistance is also accomplished since no authority can regulate or control Dot-Bit DNS; it is decentralized. The website will also load faster since it is sometimes 30x quicker to do a Dot-Bit lookup than a standard DNS lookup.
Now, the speed aspect is nice. But definitely not the most important. Instead of worrying what a government will do to liberty oriented speech online, I can get a .bit domain name for my website and not worry who controls ICANN, whether it be a corrupt US government or the far more corrupt UN. I actually hope that one day, ICANN doesn't even exist because the entire internet will have reached a totally decentralized state!