worse than IPv6 Pain Experiment

Wed Oct 9 23:30:05 UTC 2019

> Can I summarize the current round of objections to my admittedly
> off-beat proposal (use basically URLs rather than IP addresses in IP
> packet src/dest) as:
>
>  We can't do that! It would require changing something!

Nope.  You can summarize it as "it doesn't scale", which is what has 
killed endless numbers of superficially plausible bad ideas.

Like I said, if there were a few thousand URLs it could work, but with 
hundreds of millions or billions, not a chance.  Numbers with five zeros 
and numbers with nine zeros are not the same.

But while we're proposing bad ideas, how about this one: we pull the 
domain name out of the URL and flip it around and put it at the front, so 
instead of https://badidea.com/crud we have "com.badidea/https://crud." 
Now we can do hierarchical routing, starting with the "com" and then 
"com.badidea", shoving the DNS resolution into the router.

There's only a few thousand top level domains, so routers should he able 
to handle this with no problem.  Whaddaya think?

Regards,
John Levine, johnl at taugh.com, Primary Perpetrator of "The Internet for Dummies",
Please consider the environment before reading this e-mail. https://jl.ly