[12565] in Commercialization & Privatization of the Internet
Re: About the creation of new 3-letter domain(s)
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Paul A Vixie)
Sun May 22 01:16:27 1994
Date: Sat, 21 May 94 12:05:06 -0700
To: com-priv@psi.com
From: paul@vix.com (Paul A Vixie)
Since every entity (person, company, etc) changes its surroundings or other
elements of its context many times during its lifetime, the naming system
that will persist best (requiring, therefore, the fewest changes to references
such as mailing list pointers, access control lists, and so on) will be one
that is divorced from any relationship to the entity's reality context.
Self-selecting names which are arbitrary, meaning something like what we have
now, is actually the best thing I can come up with. It's not scaling well
because the hierarchy _as_populated_ is too flat, not because there is any
fundamental architectural flaw or cultural mismatch inherent in DNS.
If we need to change from the self-selected arbitrary system, the next best
thing is an assigned-random arbitrary system such as Jon Postel's proposal.
Anything that encodes into the specifier information about the object is going
to cost more in referent-updates than it ever buys in ``obviousness.'' X.500
made this error -- let's not repeat it.
I want to have one e-mail address that will always work no matter where I work,
no matter where I live, no matter what my phone number is or who gets my old
one after I move, no matter what ZIP code or country I live in, no matter if
I marry someone and change my name, no matter what, ever, period. I wish now
that I had chosen a more arbitrary domain name than I did, but ``oh well.''
I think that something like the NIC handles but extended to cover the whole
population rather than just domain/network administrators, all put into a
pseudo-domain like "@HANDLE.NET" which was full of something like MF RR's,
with some kind of hierarchy thrown in just to keep hash table and zone transfer
sizes down, would solve this problem better than any "revamp" I've seen
discussed here.
The Internet is full of people, not domains.
--
Paul Vixie
Redwood City, CA
decwrl!vixie!paul
<paul@vix.com>
