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Re: Split the IANA functions?

2014-01-07 11:40:04
On Tue, Jan 07, 2014 at 11:29:04AM -0500, Phillip Hallam-Baker wrote:
It didn't have to be a tree, it could have been something else, we could
still change it.

Gee, Phill, I love it when people elide the exact point I made when
selectively quoting, and then chide me for not having made that point.

Yes, it could be something else.  In the logically-possible world in
which I am a mud puddle, I spend less time responding to emails about
the nature of naming on the Internet.  But both the naming system on
the Internet and I (perhaps unhappily for one of us) exist in this
world.  The Internet as it stands uses the DNS, a tree-structured name
space.  A tree-structured name space has, by definition, a unique
root, due to the math in this universe.[1],[2]

Describing this as having a single root conflates a large number of issues
and essentially commits to a particular conclusion. A uniform namespace is
a requirement, a single 'root' is not.

I wasn't claiming a single root is a requirement for a uniform name
space; I don't care about that question.  I was suggesting that, given
that we have the DNS and it is the name system that is actually
deployed, we have right now a requirement for a unique root in that
name system.  If you want to make up a new non-DNS naming system and
deploy it and get the world to use it, please go nuts.  I have plenty
of complaints about the DNS and the way it works.  I suggest that the
history of IPv6 deployment prior to the actual exhaustion of the IPv4
number space gives us a pretty good lesson in the likelihood of non-DNS
global naming taking off without some killer feature.  In my opinion,
"Doesn't make Vladimir Putin grumpy," is unlikely to be the killer
feature that will cause people to change whatever invisible naming
system they use to bootstrap the applications on their tablets or find
Google or Bing.

Best regards,

A
 

[1] To acknowledge Avri's point elsewhere in this thread, yes, it is
possible to have a different CLASS with different RDATA at the name
owner name and RRTYPE.  The name space is still tree shaped with a
unique root, in that the owner names persist across all CLASSes.  This
is perhaps not quite as obvious as one would like in RFCs 1034, 1035,
and maybe 2181.  DNSEXT attempted to do something about this a few
years ago, but we didn't get any traction so we gave up. 

It is undoubtedly the case that there was some reason people didn't do
something about the difficulties with CLASSes.  One of the explanations,
of course, is that if we were going to fix the DNS at that basic a
level, we might as well replace it completely with something else that
doesn't have the properties we'd be trying to repair.

[2] I refuse to have a position on whether there is a logically
possible world in which mathematical tree structures do not by
definition have a single root.  Possible-worlds semantics over
mathematical proofs was probably too hard for me when I actually did
possible-worlds semantics work, and by now I've forgotten most of that
Latin.

-- 
Andrew Sullivan
ajs(_at_)anvilwalrusden(_dot_)com