How is Freenets namespace managed?
It isn’t. Numerous proposals for managing the namespace have been examined; however the problem is that allowing the namespace to be “managed” implies some form of centralized control. Forcing keys to be hashes of the data solves this issue, but at the same time creates other problems. For the moment the current mechanism handles names on a first-come-first-served basis but with a little bit of democracy to prevent DNS-style abuse of the mechanism. This is one of the big issues that will be discussed and hopefully addressed in the next version.
