According to the project’s website, the goal is to “create an application that runs as a service and hooks into the hosts DNS system to catch all requests to the .p2p TLD while passing all other request cleanly through. Requests for the .p2p TLD will be redirected to a locally hosted DNS database.”
I'm not sure if you mean that as just an aside or in context of this .p2p tld, but I'm pretty sure an "application that runs as a service and hooks into the hosts DNS system" would need elevation too.
Cool, so, uh, /etc/hosts?