external issues in dns scalability (1995) (was Re: Namespaces)
Vadim Antonov
avg at kotovnik.com
Thu Mar 8 23:16:50 UTC 2001
On 8 Mar 2001, Paul Vixie wrote:
> I found the postscript files and converted them to PDF and put them online:
>
> http://www.vix.com/~vixie/bad-dns-paper.pdf
> http://www.vix.com/~vixie/bad-dns-slides.pdf
>
> All I can really say is: "I told y'all so." Vadim, thanks for reminding me
> that there was a time when these problems were still soluble.
Thanks, Paul, the paper is excellent. Reminds me why i established the
rigid geographically-administraive domain allocation scheme for
organizational domains in .SU back in 90 :) This was unfortunately
abandoned by the .RU registry folks, with the resulting .COM-like chaos.
Anyway, my current position is no matter what you do, people will complain
and find ways to subvert the system. When big money moves in there's
absolutely no hope to protect registries (and their policies) from threat
of lawsuits or other forms of intimidation and political pressure.
Thus, any unique naming scheme is unworkable, no matter how you organize
it. The only way the humanity found so far to ensure uniqueness of any
kind of names is to back naming regulations with the coercive power of
states. Therefore, the choice is either to remove the cause of the
problem (i.e. the intrinsic value of names, resulting from their
human-readability), or to get national laws passed in order to create
enforceable name allocation policies.
Whatever Next Generation Internet is going to be there, i would argue that
it should not include DNS at all. Otherwise it will eventually be a
subject to licensing-style regulation by states (i.e. domain allocation).
I am personally is not a big fan of state involvement - because the very
next thing to happen after states taking the power to allocate a critical
resource (i.e. names) would be the call by various pro-censorship groups
to deny allocation of names to any kind of sites they consider
objectionable. (Hmmm... local and state governments in US are known to go
as far as to rename creeks and towns whose names were disliked for some
reasons by some vocal groups :)
On a more philosophical note - the existence of any centralized essential
resource historically always guaranteed that the control of the entire
system depending on the resource unfallingly passes to whoever manages to
seize that resource, usually to the government. There is no reason for
the Internet to have such vulnerability (and most governments out there
are not decent, by any measure).
--vadim
More information about the NANOG
mailing list