Netsukuku is an experimental peer-to-peer routing system, developed by the FreakNet MediaLab in 2005, created to build up a distributed network, anonymous and censorship-free, fully independent but not necessarily separated from the Internet, without the support of any server, ISP and no central authority.
As of December 2011, the latest theoretical work on Netsukuku could be found in the author's master thesis Scalable Mesh Networks and the Address Space Balancing problem.
The contacted node receives a request, searches in its ANDNA database for the address associated with the name and returns it to the applicant host.
The protocol is a little more complex than this, as the system provides a public/private key to authenticate the hosts and prevent unauthorized changes to the ANDNA database.
The protocol does not provide for the possibility of revoking a symbolic name; after a certain period of inactivity (currently 3 days) it is simply deleted from the database.