[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

[Karl Auerbach]

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.])

> 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.)

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.

         --karl--

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