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Alternate roots, and their strident claims to "own" various TLDs because they set
up unofficial namespaces using them somewhere, sometime, before ICANN approved them,
don't impress me much. Lots of people have set up "fake" domains on servers
of their own, including many office LANs setting up private namespaces for their
own internal use. Any Windows user can even set up all the bogus domains he/she
wants by editing the HOSTS file in the WINDOWS directory. None of this grants
any sort of intellectual property rights to the name, which you have made part of
your private namespace but not part of the official namespace of the Internet, which,
like it or not, is administered by ICANN. I don't like the way ICANN is managed
myself, but I don't try to pretend they don't really matter. If I did, I'd be like
the various groups of wackos in Texas who have proclaimed themselves to be the rightful
government of the Republic of Texas, made various historical arguments to the effect
that the admission of Texas to statehood in the 1800s was legally invalid and hence
didn't really happen, and thus the state government of Texas should be ignored as
a nonexistent entity. In practice, those groups have actually spent much of their
time and effort squabbling with the other alternative Republics of Texas (there are
several such splinter groups), much like the alternative domain roots. At some
point, different groups had websites at republic-of-texas.org, republic-of-texas.com,
and republic-of-texas.net (and maybe some other variations), but I haven't checked
them lately.
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