[At-Large] I: [ALAC-Announce] ICANN News Alert -- Notice of Preliminary Determination To Grant Registrar Data Retention Waiver Request for Ascio Technologies, Inc. Danmark - filial af Ascio Technologies, Inc. USA

[Christian de Larrinaga]

Karl Auerbach wrote:
>
> On 12/18/15 2:33 AM, Christian de Larrinaga wrote:
>> Actually DNS is not working for most of the Internet either, witness
>> we don't have names resolving to the billions and approaching
>> trillions of devices and applications services at the edge of data
>> networks.
> I've never heard that claim before.  I've run experiments with DNS and
> found surprisingly few limits on how far it can expand.  (For example,
> in one experiment [more than a decade ago] we ran Bind with tens of
> millions of top level domains and then ran query traffic [in which we
> mixed a fair amount of absent names to make it more real-life.])
>

I'm intrigued. Was this done to establish evidence that a flattening of
the hierarchy would not be a technical problem? Took about thirty years
for that shift in architecture of DNS to come out of the cold.

I am really referring to the scaling of DNS beyond server side hosts
which are now largely in located in data centres to satisfy the  need
for persistent identifiers for all our devices and services. That has
not happened using DNS registry business model as it has developed and
managed at ICANN. I dare say it could have happened technically. But the
business model doesn't work out to charge $10 or more per an for a
device orientated name service. The DNS has been taken over by those
using it as a pseudo business registration service. A role that the DNS
is bound to fail in satisfying.

Incidentally I am not knocking the work that Jon Postel and Paul
Mockapetris started back in 82 ish and many others have done some
amazing work on DNS which we all depend on today.  But it seems to have
gone as far as it can.


>> Sad fact is DNS designed in an era of big iron...
> DNS was designed in the mid 1980's, and the biggest of computers we
> had back then are overmatched even by rather small devices of today. 
> The laptop I'm using to type this makes the Crays I used (for magnetic
> confinement fusion simulations) seem rather weak.
>
> However, there is an intriguing side vector, which is that DNS is
> fading as a user-visible technology.
>
> This does not mean that DNS is going to disappear, rather that it is
> being submerged to become an internal internet name/address
> technology.  IP and MAC addresses used to be far more visible to
> users.  They became submerged under DNS names.  DNS is now following
> that path and being submerged under URI based names and
> application-local names (such as Facebook names, hashtags, Twitter
> handles, etc.)  Even URI names that contain long DNS names and index
> data are being submerged under shortened names.  I anticipate that
> attribute-based naming systems will come to dominate in certain areas
> (I am sure, however, that if one were to look inside such systems that
> DNS names will be there serving as internal machinery.)
>
I like your use of the word "submergence" of DNS. It is a great way to
put it.

> There is at least one of the new top level domain offerings that is
> based on the idea that this kind of DNS submergence is happening. 
> It's (partial) focus is on DNS names used to located technical
> resources; the human semantics of the names is not particularly
> important because it isn't humans who are uttering those DNS names. 
> On the other hand, because a flexible human has been supplanted by
> embedded firmware, the value of long term persistence of a DNS name is
> more important than cute words that such a name might contain.

Persistence and global reach of identifiers are critical qualities for
many data applications.

DNS is continuing to serve as a naming service in the sense of being
submerged within a grander URI schema such as with Handles or other
registries.  But there is the likelihood of a different identifier model
entirely appearing.

There has been a lot of interesting work that might lead to persistent
identifier routing for data objects or graphs of semantic links to give
two examples. Both would be a move away from the "everything is a file"
Unix metaphor to address content which can lie within and across many
devices, even network boundaries.

How far the DNS as it is currently structured can usefully serve in such
an environment I don't know but it is likely to become increasingly
"submerged" as you describe and I suspect increasingly routed around.

>         --karl--
>
Christian
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