MEDIA: ICANN rejects .xxx domain

Fri May 12 22:12:59 UTC 2006

On 5/12/06, Barry Shein <bzs at world.std.com> wrote:
> On May 12, 2006 at 14:51 tv at pobox.com (Todd Vierling) wrote:
>  > The complexity added by TLDs has one extremely critical good side
>  > effect:  distribution of load by explicitly avoiding a flat entity
>  > namespace.  The DNS has a hierarchical namespace for a reason, and
>  > arguments to the contrary will convince on the order of sqrt(-1)
>  > people.
>
> As if you couldn't just hash on whatever the last component is and
> pick a server on that basis? Query(server[Sum(bytes) mod Nservers])?
>
> There are probably good answers to people's suggestions for change but
> working backwards from "that's the way we've always done it"

If you bothered to read the 1983 RFCs I mentioned, and others related
to machine naming, you'd realize that the DNS of today is not, in
fact, "the way we've always done it."

The namespace *was* flat, once.  That didn't scale, and not just
because of technical limitations -- the fact that there are only so
many useful combinations of 26 letters in a relatively short name had
some weight in there too.  So hierarchical naming was standardized
(some forms of nonstandard hierarchy existed before then), and it's
unlikely we're going back anytime in the foreseeable future.

Changing *how* the names are structured into a different hierarchy of
organization, I could believe.  Changing the fact that they are
structured back to being unstructured... the ship has already sailed.

-- 
-- Todd Vierling <tv at duh.org> <tv at pobox.com> <todd at vierling.name>