Inside the Rise of the Domain Name System

Greg Huang writes "Looking back, it's almost impossible to believe that for most of the 1990s, a single company, Network Solutions, had a government-issued monopoly on registering domain names on the Internet. And considering how central the company was to the growth of the Web, it's surprising how little of the company's back story — how it got into the domain name business, or who owned it — has been told. Xconomy has an in-depth interview with two former executives from SAIC, the secretive San Diego defense contractor that bought Network Solutions in 1995 for $5 million and sold off the domain registration business in 2000 for billions of dollars."

Comments

Single entity

[sopssa]

It's interesting that Network Solution was the only handler for domain registration back in 90's and while there are lots of registrars now, they still work under ICANN. Yeah the usual argument in slashdot is that you could always start your own tld, but nobody is going to support it unless you're high in chain, aka ICANN.

Interesting aspect was a few months ago when EU wanted more freedom from ICANN and its association with US. Currently the internet domain name system is pretty much controlled by one entity, which isn't really the purpose of internet, and its also why Network Solution was taken off the domain registration game as the single player. Monopoly is never good.

Fact is, currently DNS still relies entirely on *one entity*. It goes completely against the distributed structure of the internet.

Re:Single entity

[Shakrai]

Fact is, currently DNS still relies entirely on *one entity*. It goes completely against the distributed structure of the internet.

So do IP address assignments. So do AS number assignments. Why does nobody ever complain about them? If you want something to be uniquely assigned (domain names, IP addresses, AS numbers) then it seems to me that it's going to have to be centrally managed by someone.