In message <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>, 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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