Worth reading and studying: The Cooperative Domain Service (CoDoNS) by Venugopalan Ramasubramanian and Emin Gün Sirer, a paper by two scientists at Cornell on a distributed system to replace our good old DNS.

From the abstract: “This paper describes the design and implementation of the Cooperative Domain Name System (CoDoNS), a novel name service, which provides high lookup performance through pro-active caching, resilience to denial of service attacks through automatic load-balancing, and fast propagation of updates. CoDoNS derives its scalability, decentralization, self-organization, and failure resilience from peer-to-peer overlays, while it achieves high performance using the Beehive replication framework. Cryptographic delegation, instead of host-based physical delegation, limits potential malfeasance by namespace operators and creates a competitive market for namespace management. Backwards compatibility with existing protocols and wire formats enables CoDoNS to serve as a backup for legacy DNS, as well as a complete replacement. “  (bold added by yours truly).
More info, including a FAQ at http://www.cs.cornell.edu/people/egs/beehive/codons.php .