[governance] Re: It's Time to Stop ICANN's Top-Level Domain (TLD)

[Karl Auerbach]

On 11/05/2010 03:39 AM, Meryem Marzouki wrote:

> I'm disappointed that Karl hasn't pointed to the source of all problems
> with current DNS scheme management: its unicity. In general, his booster
> shots on alternative DNS are most welcome -- by me at least;)))

Ah, I guess I have said it often enough that everyone is trained to 
expect it.

Which reminds me of an old joke: What is written on the sign on Pavlov's 
front door?  ...  "Knock, do not ring".

Now that I have you rolling on the floor with laughter (yeah, right, 
it's not that funny) ... there is a serious matter, which is that DNS 
names do not meet the requirements for stable identifiers.

A stable identifier needs certain kinds of stability:

    - Client stability (the name has the same meaning no matter who asks)

    - Location stability (the name has the same meaning no matter where 
the question of meaning is asked)

    - Temporal stability (if the name has meaning, then the meaning 
remains the same no matter when the question of meaning is asked)

DNS names most clearly fail on the third of these requirements - DNS 
names simply change too often.

But DNS names are increasingly failing on the client and location 
stability requirements.  For example "google.com" resolves differently 
depending where the client is.

We are all too familiar with the rot of email addresses and URL/URI's.

For long term purposes we either need DNS zones in which once a name and 
record is created it becomes immutable and permanent, or we need another 
naming system.

For cloud computing the issue gets a lot more complicated because we 
*do* want to resolve names based on things like proximity and legal home 
of the client and server.  And we need to accommodate locking a 
relationship (if only for a few minutes if not permanently) between a 
client to a particular instance of a cloud resource.

Archivists and historians of the future are going to curse us for the 
way we are using fragile and unstable names to identify what the 
internet is creating.

I have thought that perhaps I ought to start plopping a GUID/UUID string 
into everything I write.  That way there would be at least a stable name 
embedded into the content itself:

	ee1a7c75-19a0-44f3-8cb9-627c20af8298

		--karl--
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