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Re: Reexamining premises (was Re: UN plans to take over our job!)

2005-09-30 13:27:35
In message <433D8628(_dot_)8030902(_at_)masten-space(_dot_)com>, Michael 
Mealling writes:
<entire discussion by smart people deleted for brevity>

Might I suggest all participants in this discussion figure out what you
really want to use DNS for if you were to assume it didn't exist in the
first place. Imagine going back in time to 1986 and explaining to
everyone at the IETF the way things would develop and then, after
they've stopped laughing, imagine what kind of system would have
resulted. My personal suspicion is that two things would be very different:

There wouldn't be one monolithic namespace/protocol/system. At least two
systems would exist: one for hiding IP network layer topology from apps
and another for describing and naming services for end users.

The system that faced the users would be inherently trademark friendly
and wouln't be hierarchical. The output of such a system wouldn't be an
IP address but instead a complex record that described a compound object
called a 'service'. It might be what people today call "peer to peer"
(although I have yet to find a good definition of what that means) but
that might not be an issue since the names wouldn't be hierarchical.

What I find humorous is that this community's default position seems to
be to attempt to play politics with those who are professionals at it
rather than solving the problems with technology which is what you'd
think we're good at....

There are several crucial attributes that are hard to replicate that 
way.  One is uniqueness: whenever I do a query for a name, I get back 
exactly one answer, and it's the same answer everyone else should get.  
This is the problem with "alternate" roots -- depending on where you 
are, you can get a different answer.  It's also what differentiates it 
from a search engine -- my applications don't know how to make choices.

Beyond that, the mapping should be under control of the appropriate 
party.  I don't want the moral equivalent to "Google-bombing" to be 
able to divert, say, my incoming mail.

Finally, you need locality: people within an organization must be able 
to create their own names.

It may be that some of these requiremets are fundamentally at odds with 
the notion of full decentralization. 

                --Steven M. Bellovin, http://www.cs.columbia.edu/~smb



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