OpenNIC
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| Founded | June 1, 2000 |
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| Purpose | Provides a non-national alternative to the traditional Top-Level Domain registries. OpenNIC is a user owned and controlled Network Information Center. |
| Website | www |
OpenNIC (also referred to as the OpenNIC Project) is a user owned and controlled top-level Network Information Center that offers a non-national alternative to traditional Top-Level Domain (TLD) registries such as ICANN. As of January 2017 OpenNIC recognizes and peers all existing ICANN TLDs, for compatibility reasons. However, OpenNIC has not yet evaluated and does not hold a formal position on future ICANN TLDs.
In addition to resolving hostnames in the ICANN root, OpenNIC also resolves hostnames in OpenNIC operated namespaces, as well as within namespaces with which peering agreements have been established. Some OpenNIC recursive servers (Tier 2 servers) are known for their high speeds and low latency, relative to other more widely used DNS recursors, as well as their anonymizing or no-logging policies. Tier 2 servers are operated by community volunteers across a multitude of geographic locations.
Like all alternative root DNS systems, OpenNIC-hosted domains are unreachable to the vast majority of Internet users, because they require a non-default configuration in one's DNS resolver.
On June 1, 2000, an article was posted on kuro5hin.org advocating a democratically governed domain name system. The first OpenNIC servers went into operation July of that year.
These TLDs are currently served by OpenNIC, and were constructed with the approval of the OpenNIC community.
OpenNIC provides resolution of select other alternative DNS roots.
New Nations provides TLDs for nation-states that are not recognized by the ISO 3166-1 alpha-2 standard, and therefore haven't received their own ccTLD. Currently they provide .ku (Kurdish people), .te (Tamil Eelam), .ti (Tibet), and .uu (Uyghur people).
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