In message <433D8628.8030902@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>, 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 _______________________________________________ Ietf@xxxxxxxx https://www1.ietf.org/mailman/listinfo/ietf