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Paul Mockapetris On The Future of DNS
penciling_in writes "In a CircleID article called Letting
DNS Loose, Paul Mockapetris, the inventor of DNS and Chief Scientist and Chairman of Nominum, gives a good indication of
what is to be expected in the upcoming years when it comes to data riding on
DNS: "RFID tags, UPC codes, International characters in email
addresses and host names, and a variety of other identifiers could all go into
DNS, and folks have occasionally proposed doing just that. It's really just a
question of figuring out how to use the DNS -- it's ready to carry arbitrary
identifiers." According to Paul, there are 40 or so data types to be added
to DNS: "In fact the whole ENUM scheme is built out of classical DNS
technology, and NAPTR is really just the latest data type to be added to the
DNS. NAPTR is also just an extension of SRV, which was an extension of MX, which
are DNS data types that Active Directory uses to start itself and the Internet
uses to route each piece of mail." Paul also clarifies the recent BBC story
previously discussed here
on Slashdot."
Naming conventions are pretty useless these days. The ``big'' TLDs like .com, .org, .net, etc. are all remnants from the old days when the Internet was still US-only. Nowadays we have all those country domains, which may or may not implement some scheme to indicate the type of site (.uk does, .nl doesn't).
.nu domain, the server is in California, and my content comes entirely from the Netherlands, then what country does my site belong to? So perhaps we should just dispense with the current naming scheme altogether and just have one word as name for the main site (I think RealNames attempted this and failed). Instead of http://www.google.com/ one would just write ``Google'' (or maybe ``google''?), dropping the http://www which is fairly redundant when using a webbrowser (yes, I know that ``www'' indicates the hostname, but who cares what the hostname is, I just want the site), and the TLD which is basically meaningless.
Two things make the TLDs pretty much meaningless: a traditional TLD (.com etc.) does not neccesarily indicate the type of site, and a country code does not necessarily indicate the Real World location of a site (.nu anyone?). Besides, ``location'' is a very vague notion on the Internet. If my site has a
Just an idea for the more-or-less distant future.
If it needs a [UPC|RFID|Serial number|unique ID of any kind] why not give it an IPv6 address? It's a well designed heirarchical system, and DNS is already capable of handling it.
There is no reasonable defense against an idiot with an agenda
:wq
a) Adult
b) Shopping
c) News
d) etc.
This way, I can prevent myself from accidentally going to hidden goatse.cx links that appear under more innoculous DNS entries such as "www.welcometomysite.com".
Someone really should have asked him about any plans to make DNS more peer-to-peer oriented, like the recent project to make BitTorrent .torrents part of DNS, found here:
http://www.netrogenic.com/dnstorrent/
DNS needs stability and property rights for existing names and uses,
and therefore requires somebody who can manage, second, the DNS also
needs somebody with the ability to create revolutionary change and
expand the technology into international character sets,telephony
applications, and new TLDs, which will require someone who is
visionary and not afraid to turn the sacred cows of the International
Telecommunication Union and the Internet Society into hamburger if
they get in the way.
- Paul Mockapetris, January 23, 2001
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