"The global domain name system is obsolete."That's a pretty bold statement to
make. Think about it a moment, mull
it over: "DNS is a relic of a set of problems
which have been solved
in more appropriate ways".
I don't think that assessment
is far off the mark. Right now, you have
an infinite number of organizations and
individuals fighting over a
finite namespace. As we're beginning to see, that
approach is failing
miserably. And yet, for some reason, we're clinging to this
system
which in the Internet of today is no longer needed.
There have been a
number of recommendations to address this, from
ICANN suggesting that additional
top-level domains be added, to some
which have suggested an overhaul of how naming
is handled, and brush
up against the issue. But these all miss the fact that,
globally, we
already have an addressing system; it's at the heart of everything,
has
no political or legal baggage, and is something that many people
these days take
for granted: IP addresses.
"But wait," you might say, "how do we find a particular
organization
or individual website?" The days of when you could simply type in
a
company name and place a ".com" on the end of it are quickly
departing, which
means you need to bookmark websites that you've
previously found interesting,
and that you need search engines to
locate websites that you haven't found yet.
A mnemonic name is really
only a convenience for marketing materials at this point,
and with the
shortage of names, the mnemonic value is quickly lost too as more
and
more "names" begin looking and sounding very similar (and this doesn't
even
address the problem of DNS names not handling international
character sets, meaning
that names are essentially locked into the
letters A through Z, and the numbers
0 through 9).
"But wait," you might say, "how do we handle email in a DNS-less
world?"
The same way; LDAP-based people registries are a far more
efficient way of locating
people you're trying to find (rather than
blinding trying addresses), and addressbooks
have long been the only
way for most people to really manage the addresses of
people they
know. When you only need to type in "emarshal@[205.243.138.83]" once,
and
can reference it from then on as "Edward S. Marshall", "Ed", or
"Sysadmin", the
original address quickly becomes irrelevant as the
mnemonics have once again been
lost, replaced by a mnemonic much more
suited to the individual user's needs.
"But
wait," you might say, "how do we conveniently reference other
systems?" Easily:
enterprise-level DNS. Managing namespaces internally
makes even more sense with
the trends leading toward non-routable IP
addresses for numbering an internal
network. Just like each person
references other people by privately-managed addressbooks
and
bookmarks, locally-managed DNS is a perfect means to handle intra-
organizational
addressing. Most organizations already do this, using
DNS or WINS to manage the
naming of their systems independant of the
rest of the world. These names become
irrelevant when the systems they
refer to are private or unreachable.
"But wait,"
you might say, "how do we perform geographically-diverse
load balancing?" Load-balancing
technology has already reached the
maturity level necessary for this, and is in
heavy use today. DNS is a
poor way to perform robust load balancing; it cannot
handle anything
other than evenly distributed balancing, and cannot even guarantee
that.
Use of an IP-level load-balancing product is a far more
appropriate approach to
the problem given what is available today. In
a web-based application, the problem
is solved in an even easier
manner through the use of redirection. DNS, while
a good "first try"
at solving the load balancing problem, really fails to solve
it as
well as current technologies.
"But wait," you might say, "how do we renumber
without an impact on
our availability?" A similar question, with equally damaging
ramifications,
is "how do we rename after a trademark dispute takes
our domain name from us?"
The same problem looms here, and unless
there is an exact mapping of trademark
law to domain management, there
will always be a risk of having your name taken.
Just like the post
office assigns an address to a business, ARIN and similar
organizations
(by proxy through your ISP/NSPs) assign your addresses
to you. These addresses
are determined by your location; for the post
office it's a geographical assignment,
and for ARIN/RIPE/etc, it's a
topological assignment. Either way, changing addresses
should always
be well-considered before doing it, and updating registries (business
listings,
phone books, search engines, people directories, etc) should
be an important part
of that consideration.
In the end, the need for DNS to be our global means of indexing
content
has outlived its usefulness. Local DNS servers can be used for
the need of local
addressing, and IP addresses serve the need for
global location. Bookmarking and
address registries have replaced the
need for mnemonic names to refer to Internet
systems.
The global domain name system is obsolete. Please don't artificially
prolong
the life of a system that is already dead.
Edward S. Marshall <emarshal@logic.net>