Subject: RE: Reexamining premises (was Re: UN plans to take over our job!)

From: "Hallam-Baker, Phillip" <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 30 Sep 2005 14:47:16 -0700

> From: [email-masked] [mailto:[email-masked]] On 

> There are several crucial attributes that are hard to 
> replicate that way.  One is uniqueness: whenever I do a query 
> for a name, I get back exactly one answer, and it's the same 
> answer everyone else should get.  
> This is the problem with "alternate" roots -- depending on 
> where you are, you can get a different answer.  It's also 
> what differentiates it from a search engine -- my 
> applications don't know how to make choices.

Alternate roots are bogus. The only case where they work is where people
do not want to connect to the rest of the world. I have a private zone
set up in my house on .local for testing. I am sure there are similar
military nets.

I have no idea why anyone would prefer (say) .gprs over .gprs.arpa or
the like.

Fragmentation of the root is a real threat, but only if people do try to
do something silly (e.g. Kyle's mom gets congress to exclude .ca).

> Beyond that, the mapping should be under control of the 
> appropriate party.  I don't want the moral equivalent to 
> "Google-bombing" to be able to divert, say, my incoming mail.

I don't think that this is what Michael was suggesting. His point as I
understand it is that DNS is designed to resolve a name to a machine
rather than a name,service pair to a machine.

Subsequently we have developed mechanisms such as MX and SRV that try to
change this but people continue to insist on the original architecture
as the only legitimate approach. Witness all the shouting that has gon
on around attempts to store policy information in the DNS.

Today a DNS name is a conceptual relationship to a collection of
services. 

> Finally, you need locality: people within an organization 
> must be able to create their own names.

Arbitrary registration of top level domains would not have prevented
local delegation. The problem with monolithic DNS is that it forces
hierarchy where none exists.

There is a distinction between commercial, educational and non-profit
enterprises but it is not a very important one. It is certainly not
important enough for them to require separate name spaces. Different
TLDs for different countries is also kinda bogus.

If we were redesigning the DNS today the root would contain as much
information people cared to put in it. We would work out some other
scheme for load balancing etc. The .edu/.com scheme really reflects the
NSF funding criteria of the day.

However the fact remains that we are not redesigning DNS from scratch
and it has largely been fixed already - if we choose to recognize the
fact.

One point made by Michael I think people should really take account of:

>What I find humorous is that this community's default position 
>seems to be to attempt to play politics with those who are
professionals 
>at it rather than solving the problems with technology which is what 
>you'd think we're good at....

This is international power politics at the highest level. The real
issue here is not governance of the Internet, that is just a convenient
pretext.

There is a diplomatic battle going on here that threatens to become a
real war. Diplomats prefer to avoid wars so they invented 'protocol'
which at certain times mean that the participants go off and find
something they can fight over that allows them to demonstrate the stakes
and their positions with less risk of actual fighting. 

This is of course the main reason why most people would prefer to avoid
that type of involvement.

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From: Michael Mealling <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 30 Sep 2005 17:58:16 -0400

>rather than a name,service pair to a machine.

Sort of. What I was trying to get at was that DNS is designed to resolve 
an identifier to a machine for consumption by computer programs, not as 
a human factors component of a user facing system capable of helping 
humans get things done that humans care about. Its the difference 
between forcing my grandmother to learn SQL to do a search and giving 
her "Ask Jeeves".

To get specific for a moment, my suggestion here is that the IETF take a 
look at what the W3C and the general web community is doing around 
navigation, tagging (see Technorati, del.icio.us, flickr), advances in 
NLP that Google is working on, etc. Perhaps the solution is to tell the 
world that DNS isn't really meant for your grandmother or your favorite 
polititicain and instead we're going to do something at the web layer 
that's more in tune with how people are actually using the Internet, not 
how mail gets routed....

And maybe that work doesn't belong here....

-MM

-- 
Michael Mealling                  Masten Space Systems, Inc.
VP Business Development                       473 Sapena Ct.
Office: +1-678-581-9656                            Suite 23
Cell: +1-678-640-6884                 Santa Clara, CA 95054
                 http://masten-space.com/

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From: "Anthony G. Atkielski" <[email-masked]>
Date: Sat, 1 Oct 2005 00:15:21 +0200

Hallam-Baker, Phillip writes:

> do not want to connect to the rest of the world.

That's exactly what a lot of national governments would like to do.

> Fragmentation of the root is a real threat, but only if people do
> try to do something silly (e.g. Kyle's mom gets congress to exclude
> .ca).

That's exactly what a lot of national governments would like to do.

> Subsequently we have developed mechanisms such as MX and SRV that
> try to change this but people continue to insist on the original
> architecture as the only legitimate approach. Witness all the
> shouting that has gon on around attempts to store policy information
> in the DNS.

When every change must be propagated to a billion machines, a
conservative approach is best.

> hierarchy where none exists.

But it does exist, just as it does for the telephone network.

> information people cared to put in it.

If we were redesigning it today, it would never actually be up and
running.  Instead, it would be continually revised in endless volumes
of specifications written by people with nothing better to do in life,
and nobody would implement more than a fraction of the spec, and
they'd always be several versions behind, and their implementations
would never be quite correct, and nothing would ever work together
very smoothly at all.

The reason the Internet is successful is that it was designed before
the bureaucrats took over.  The reason X.400 failed is that it was
designed after the bureaucrats took over.

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From: "Anthony G. Atkielski" <[email-masked]>
Date: Sat, 1 Oct 2005 00:16:43 +0200

> that's more in tune with how people are actually using the Internet, not

Do it with telephones first, as a proof of concept.  If there's still
a usable telephone network after that, then perhaps it might be worthy
of consideration for the Internet.

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From: Michael Mealling <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 30 Sep 2005 18:35:29 -0400

>of consideration for the Internet.

Being one of the co-authors of the ENUM spec, I've actually paid 
attention to how that's all working out. Have you checked into how Skype 
and VOIP in general are working internationally lately? Not an E.164 
phone number anywhere in the entire thing. Its all identifiers that look 
like AOL screen names and peering agreements. And it seems to be working 
out just fine....

-MM

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From: "Anthony G. Atkielski" <[email-masked]>
Date: Sat, 1 Oct 2005 00:49:19 +0200

Michael Mealling writes:

> Have you checked into how Skype and VOIP in general are working
> internationally lately?

No.  I already have a telephone.

> Not an E.164 phone number anywhere in the entire thing. Its all identifiers that look

Okay, now make it work for the existing telephone system.