Dan Kaminsky

Wed Aug 5 16:49:01 UTC 2009

> My interest was in replacing the protocol.  I've grown fond of the
> name space, for all of its warts.

As we evolved from circuit switching to packet switching, which many at the
time said it would never work, and from the HOSTS.TXT to DNS, sooner or later
the “naming scheme” for resources on the net will imho in the future evolve
to something better and different from DNS.

No doubt for more than 25 years DNS has provided a great service, and it had
many challenges and will continue for some time to do so.

But DNS from being a simple way to provide name resolution evolved to something
more complex, and also degenerated into a protocol/service that created a new
industry when a monetary value was stuck to particular sequences of characters
that require to be globally unique and the base to construct a URL.

At some time in the future and when a new paradigm for the user interface is
conceived, we may not longer have the end user “typing” a URL, the DNS or
something similar will still be in the background providing name to address
mapping but there will be no more monetary value associated with it or that
value will be transferred to something else.

It may sound too futuristic and inspired from science fiction, but I never saw
Captain Piccard typing a URL on the Enterprise.

Sooner or later, we or the new generation of ietfers and nanogers, will need to
start thinking about a new naming paradigm and design the services and protocols
associated with it.

The key question is, when we start?

Meanwhile we have to live with what we have and try to improve it as much as
we can.

My .02