Paul Mockapetris On The Future of DNS

penciling_in writes "In a CircleID article called Letting DNS Loose, Paul Mockapetris, the inventor of DNS and Chief Scientist and Chairman of Nominum, gives a good indication of what is to be expected in the upcoming years when it comes to data riding on DNS: "RFID tags, UPC codes, International characters in email addresses and host names, and a variety of other identifiers could all go into DNS, and folks have occasionally proposed doing just that. It's really just a question of figuring out how to use the DNS -- it's ready to carry arbitrary identifiers." According to Paul, there are 40 or so data types to be added to DNS: "In fact the whole ENUM scheme is built out of classical DNS technology, and NAPTR is really just the latest data type to be added to the DNS. NAPTR is also just an extension of SRV, which was an extension of MX, which are DNS data types that Active Directory uses to start itself and the Internet uses to route each piece of mail." Paul also clarifies the recent BBC story previously discussed here on Slashdot."

naming conventions

[Anonymous Coward]

Naming conventions are pretty useless these days. The ``big'' TLDs like .com, .org, .net, etc. are all remnants from the old days when the Internet was still US-only. Nowadays we have all those country domains, which may or may not implement some scheme to indicate the type of site (.uk does, .nl doesn't).

Two things make the TLDs pretty much meaningless: a traditional TLD (.com etc.) does not neccesarily indicate the type of site, and a country code does not necessarily indicate the Real World location of a site (.nu anyone?). Besides, ``location'' is a very vague notion on the Internet. If my site has a .nu domain, the server is in California, and my content comes entirely from the Netherlands, then what country does my site belong to? So perhaps we should just dispense with the current naming scheme altogether and just have one word as name for the main site (I think RealNames attempted this and failed). Instead of http://www.google.com/ one would just write ``Google'' (or maybe ``google''?), dropping the http://www which is fairly redundant when using a webbrowser (yes, I know that ``www'' indicates the hostname, but who cares what the hostname is, I just want the site), and the TLD which is basically meaningless.

Just an idea for the more-or-less distant future.

Why not an IP address?

[Lxy]

If it needs a [UPC|RFID|Serial number|unique ID of any kind] why not give it an IPv6 address? It's a well designed heirarchical system, and DNS is already capable of handling it.

More Basic DNS issues need to be resolved

[Anonymous Coward]

For example, DNS entries should have additional information stored within them, such as classifications as to whether the site is:

a) Adult

b) Shopping

c) News

d) etc.

This way, I can prevent myself from accidentally going to hidden goatse.cx links that appear under more innoculous DNS entries such as "www.welcometomysite.com".

What about P2P?

[SexyKellyOsbourne]

Someone really should have asked him about any plans to make DNS more peer-to-peer oriented, like the recent project to make BitTorrent .torrents part of DNS, found here:

http://www.netrogenic.com/dnstorrent/ [netrogenic.com]

Re:naming conventions

[Anonymous Coward]

Old versions of Netscape sent you to whitehouse.com, but every commercial browser made in the last 5 years uses a directory service and takes you to whitehouse.gov.

(I seem to remember the whitehouse.com people threating to sue Netscape when they made this change.)

Re:naming conventions

[mauthbaux]

Personally, I always thought that pr0n sites should be .sex sites... for instance teens.sex girls.sex...(or if you prefer) goat.sex It would make pr0n easier to find for those who were looking for it, and easy to avoid for those looking to avoid it.... just my 2 cents.. ~mauthbaux

Mockapetris mentioned this earlier

[rs79]

DNS needs stability and property rights for existing names and uses,
and therefore requires somebody who can manage, second, the DNS also
needs somebody with the ability to create revolutionary change and
expand the technology into international character sets,telephony
applications, and new TLDs, which will require someone who is
visionary and not afraid to turn the sacred cows of the International
Telecommunication Union and the Internet Society into hamburger if
they get in the way.
- Paul Mockapetris, January 23, 2001

More here [dnso.com]