I just read a good article, Pushing Peer-to-Peer, by Simson Garfinkel in his The Net Effect column for the MIT Technology Review (via Cory's post on BoingBoing, P2P can save the net ).

The net idea of the iCite net is as an overlay network, something along the lines that Garfinkel describes. iCites (technically iCite Containers) have a p2p relationship with each other.

Garfinkel mentions the advantages of running DNS on top of a p2p network instead of on a loose confederation of name servers, and this was particularly interesting to me since the iCite net has a DNS counterpart called iCNS that, thus far, is only imagined to run on a loose confederation of iCNS name servers.

I don't see how DNS could be run on top of p2p—I mean, isn't DNS itself a network overlay over IP? And, don't DNS servers connect to each other in a p2p fashion already? How would a p2p network not dependent on DNS work better as an overlay than one dependent on DNS?

If you have some insight into this, please leave me some comments.