Alternative DNS systems and net neutrality - Was: Re: [governance] DNSsec and allternative DNS system

[Stephane Bortzmeyer]

On Fri, Nov 16, 2007 at 02:02:33PM -0300,
 Carlos Afonso <ca at rits.org.br> wrote 
 a message of 148 lines which said:

> I asked Vint and Bob (Kahn), yesterday at the IGF Emerging Issues
> panel, about the current names-and-numbers paradigm and whether
> there will be a paradigm shift (along the lines described by Thomas
> Kuhn) -- a scenario in which a "semantic Web" will dominate finding
> of any information space (the largest significant glimpse of it
> being Google search) and eventually totally replacing the URL
> approach (at least at the user level) to locate information and
> services. Thus, domain to number resolution will we pushed so far in
> the background that it will become irrelevant regarding the current
> business model on top of which the Icann system sits.

There have been many speculations (and even serious proposals) about
new ways to find something on the Internet. See, for instance, "A
Proposal to Separate Internet Handles from Names" by Michael
J. O'Donnell
(http://people.cs.uchicago.edu/~odonnell/Citizen/Network_Identifiers/)
Another proposal is the keyword systems, as in IETF's RFC 2345.

Today, at least in France, most Internet users do not use or
understand the DNS, they even type the domain name in Google's search
box (see, in French,
http://thomas-fourdin.net/blog/index.php?post/2007/06/05/Qui-tient-la-barre-dadresse
or
http://www.bortzmeyer.org/identificateur-vs-moteur-de-recherche.html).

In english, see a funny discussion in Wikipedia
(http://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/wikipedia-l/2006-July/027186.html)
about Syracuse (nothing to do with Milton).

But it does not mean we should accept it: things can change, people
can be educated, etc. One way to explain is to emphasize what you may
loose with other proposals (for instance, with O'Donnell's "handles",
it seems there is no way to have a stable, reliable *and* meaningful
identifier, either they are stable and reliable *or* they are
meaningful).
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