Discuss mailing list

[FreedomNIC Team <freedomnicteam AT protonmail.com>]

Hello OpenNIC community,

We're the team behind FreedomNIC. FreedomNIC was founded a couple of weeks ago, under a different name but still and we recently have been transforming and growing at a somewhat rapid rate. We would like to peer with OpenNIC as it would grow FreedomNIC at an even faster rate, make discovery of FreedomNIC easy and it would grow the alternative DNS network as a whole, enough to maybe one day start a foundation.

Let's answer some questions you all may have.

What TLD's are available?

At this time all of the TLD's available are as follows: .arpa, .fnic (closed, not open to the public), .web, .archive, .ger, .ginga, .zmrd, .xeon, .xd, .test, .px, .retro, .hovna and finally .wingy (with which is a closed TLD and is not open to the public)

Why is .arpa a TLD?

We have policies when it comes to establishing TLD's to disallow any TLD that is on ICANN's network but we do have and make exemptions for certain TLD's including .arpa. .arpa was exempted from said policies because its not used much in the first place and the only limitations we really as FreedomNIC put on it were that any domain that existed in the .arpa namespace on ICANN would not be allowed to be registered in FreedomNIC's namespace.

What's your policy for establishing TLD's?

Our policy for establishing TLD's is very simple and is actually more lenient than OpenNIC. All a person has to do to establish a TLD and become a TLD Operator therefore is read the TLD Establishment Guidelines, then suggest a TLD is what we call it and then FreedomNIC staff will look it over and make sure it complies and then we contact them regarding it and ask any additional questions we may have. Over 99% of the time TLD suggestions do end up being approved.

Who runs FreedomNIC?

There are 3 heads who handle most if not all of the operations at FreedomNIC. That would be VoyArchivist, the person who wrote this email and started the discussion and who also founded FreedomNIC, epicness, who is our Technical Support Leader and handles most of the backend stuff including his custom-coded proxy script and finally Java2107 who provides and pays for the dedicated server we use.

What would you do to combat domain squatting?

At this time, an expiration system for domains and TLD's is not in place but we do have plans to establish one.

Do you have a website?

Yes we do! You can find our website which is currently in development over at https://freedomnic.net. The reason why we're not sending this email from freedomnic.net is because we're having some email problems so this Protonmail makes up for that. We will be available later on though over at team AT freedomnic.net.

OpenNIC exists, why did you create this?

Good question, we started FreedomNIC because we personally felt that OpenNIC wasn't open enough. We felt that Freedom of _expression_ should actually mean Freedom of _expression_. OpenNIC requires you to own a server and run it for at least a year before you can even think about launching a TLD in the OpenNIC namespace, we felt bad for those who couldn't and we thought about ourselves if we were in that position so that's where FreedomNIC comes in. Our main premise is on the Freedom of _expression_ which we define as including the right to launch a TLD with no money, no servers, no nothing. We handle it all.

Do you have a publicly available TLD list for OpenNIC or other users who might need it?

We do not at this time but it will be available soon at tlds.fnic.

Do you have intentions to ban or disallow the creation of TLD's that already exist in other namespaces like OpenNIC's?

Yes we do! Should we peer up with OpenNIC and other alternative DNS servers we will indeed put policies in place to prevent that kind of situation from happening. At this time though, seeing as we aren't peering there is no danger of conflicts. We will, for the time being however disallow the creation of TLD's that exist in other namespaces.

Do you have a rate limiting system to block DDoS attacks?

We do not at this time but it has been suggested to us in the alternative DNS community and we do plan on implementing one soon.

How do domain registrations work?

While the website's in development, we use Discord to process domain and TLD registrations. Its manual, but we use a custom-coded bot to sort them. If you'd like to join because you're curious or would like to speak to us in a more direct manner then you can join our Discord here: https://discord.gg/KrSB2saMDC

Thank you all for reading,

The FreedomNIC Team

- Written by VoyArchivist, Founder and Head of FreedomNIC