5 ms·

The end of a single global namespace?

52 points by unicornporn 16y ago

tomjen3 16y ago
Unlikely. Most likely we will end up with something like Freenet. I can't decide if that is a good thing or not.
- borism 16y ago
  But you already decided: "most likely we will end up with something like Freenet"
  - khafra 16y ago
    I re-read tomjen3's comment 3 times and couldn't find a value judgement, only a prediction. Where is the value judgement?
    - borism 16y ago
      Freenet is known as not exactly your ideal freedom-of-information situation, with most content reportedly being child pornography.
      - khafra 16y ago
        Ah, the implicit syllogism is "if rampant child porn and neo-nazi content is what we'll eventually end up with, that's bad." It was too subtle for me, but it didn't deserve downmods; I'm upmodding it.
crocowhile 16y ago
That would be about time. The DNS/ICANN system is by far the weakest point of the internet. First, I don't see why you have to pay to own a domain. Second, what's the point of having tld associated to countries? Obviously everything behind DNS/ICANN is just there to leave government the chance to track people and shut down services. Time to get rid of this.
- qjz 16y ago
  What would you replace it with that doesn't have the same weaknesses? DNS already has a robust distribution model (as long as most TTLs are set reasonably high). Its main weaknesses are trust (in the crypto sense, i.e. that lookups are reliably authenticated) and policy (it should be inconceivable that any person or agency could tamper with an established domain name; after all, who fights crime by erasing a suspect's name?). I agree that the current system is being mismanaged, but transferring authority to another entity doesn't necessarily address the inherent weaknesses. BTW, I'm with you 100% on the madness of TLDs. Sure, reserve some for specific uses, but there's no reason you shouldn't be able to register an arbitrary string as a TLD, and do it cheaply (except you have to solve the problem of domain squatting).
  - crocowhile 16y ago
    A decentralized/p2p model would help. You could think of a system in which you register a domain associated to a GPG key and you need the key to take it down or change DNS record. This way you get the cloud resolving addresses and you avoid the obvious risk of DNS hijack.
    - stcredzero 16y ago
      What about the squatters who would make their own keys in the initial rush? There would have to be a central authority to bootstrap this. After the initial bootstrap, the free market could take over. (I'd trust Google or Amazon with this, especially if they knew users could switch over to a competitor if they were P.O.'d)
- rbranson 16y ago
  The purpose of charging fees to own a domain is to ensure that they are allocated optimally. Sure, fees are a crude way to achieve this, but they are also a relatively inexpensive and they generally work. If domains were free, squatters would just start registering names in sequence. Personally, I feel like the fees are too low and encourage speculation as it is. They should go back to the $100/year levels for second-level domains. Perhaps they should open up some very inexpensive ($1-$2/yr) tertiary domains.
Qz 16y ago
Internauts... I think everyone should start using this word.
- ced 16y ago
  It's already common language in French: internaute. News anchors use it frequently, and there's 7,380,000 results on Google. It sounds a bit cooler in English though.
Dobbs 16y ago
Is there any reason we can't create a new root. Then have lookup servers who have both roots. So the lookup server sees 'example.com' and checks ExampleNIC. ExampleNIC doesn't have 'example.com' and so the lookup server checks ICANN Root. If the lookup server gets 'example.other' it checks ExampleNIC and continues. This should be able to scale to a large number of alternative roots. If you move between root domains you will have to get new domain names but no one power controls the DNS system.
- rbranson 16y ago
  People have been trying this since the beginning of DNS, especially back in the 90s when domain names were expensive.
kragen 16y ago
China has already added some Chinese-language top-level domains to their DNS namespace. The underlying problem here is Zooko's triangle: nobody has demonstrated a global namespace that is, in Zooko's words, secure, decentralized, and human-meaningful. Centralized systems inherently have central points of failure. Approaches like dot-p2p and Telecomix do not tackle this problem and will therefore not improve the situation. There are a number of projects trying to tackle the problem by means of petnames, using non-human-meaningful identifiers in the global namespace (so they can be secure and decentralized). Git is probably the most prominent, but others include Freenet and Tahoe-LAFS, and there are quite a number of similar projects that are not yet public. Unfortunately, none of them are currently a replacement for the World-Wide Web, a problem I wrote about at some length in this unfinished essay in 2006: http://lists.canonical.org/pipermail/kragen-tol/2006-November/000841.html http://lists.canonical.org/pipermail/kragen-tol/2006-Novembe...
- tankenmate 16y ago
  Also remember that China's .com doesn't look the same as Verisign's.
thirdstation 16y ago
One approach to this problem is called the Handle System. http://www.handle.net/ http://www.handle.net/ It's like DNS except individual identifiers can be managed independently (imagine if example.com/foo and example.com/bar were managed by two different companies). One problem that it does not address is human-friendliness. Identifiers all start with a handle prefix that's a number like 10.1109/ or 10000.1/. Though, the latest release of the software will map DNS names to handle prefixes. It's interesting technology and quite robust. For $50 a year you can host as many handles as you want.

52 points by unicornporn 16y ago

tomjen3 16y ago

Unlikely. Most likely we will end up with something like Freenet. I can't decide if that is a good thing or not.

borism 16y ago
But you already decided: "most likely we will end up with something like Freenet"
- khafra 16y ago
  I re-read tomjen3's comment 3 times and couldn't find a value judgement, only a prediction. Where is the value judgement?
  - borism 16y ago
    Freenet is known as not exactly your ideal freedom-of-information situation, with most content reportedly being child pornography.
    - khafra 16y ago
      Ah, the implicit syllogism is "if rampant child porn and neo-nazi content is what we'll eventually end up with, that's bad." It was too subtle for me, but it didn't deserve downmods; I'm upmodding it.

crocowhile 16y ago

That would be about time. The DNS/ICANN system is by far the weakest point of the internet. First, I don't see why you have to pay to own a domain. Second, what's the point of having tld associated to countries? Obviously everything behind DNS/ICANN is just there to leave government the chance to track people and shut down services. Time to get rid of this.

qjz 16y ago
What would you replace it with that doesn't have the same weaknesses? DNS already has a robust distribution model (as long as most TTLs are set reasonably high). Its main weaknesses are trust (in the crypto sense, i.e. that lookups are reliably authenticated) and policy (it should be inconceivable that any person or agency could tamper with an established domain name; after all, who fights crime by erasing a suspect's name?). I agree that the current system is being mismanaged, but transferring authority to another entity doesn't necessarily address the inherent weaknesses. BTW, I'm with you 100% on the madness of TLDs. Sure, reserve some for specific uses, but there's no reason you shouldn't be able to register an arbitrary string as a TLD, and do it cheaply (except you have to solve the problem of domain squatting).
- crocowhile 16y ago
  A decentralized/p2p model would help. You could think of a system in which you register a domain associated to a GPG key and you need the key to take it down or change DNS record. This way you get the cloud resolving addresses and you avoid the obvious risk of DNS hijack.
  - stcredzero 16y ago
    What about the squatters who would make their own keys in the initial rush? There would have to be a central authority to bootstrap this. After the initial bootstrap, the free market could take over. (I'd trust Google or Amazon with this, especially if they knew users could switch over to a competitor if they were P.O.'d)
rbranson 16y ago
The purpose of charging fees to own a domain is to ensure that they are allocated optimally. Sure, fees are a crude way to achieve this, but they are also a relatively inexpensive and they generally work. If domains were free, squatters would just start registering names in sequence. Personally, I feel like the fees are too low and encourage speculation as it is. They should go back to the $100/year levels for second-level domains. Perhaps they should open up some very inexpensive ($1-$2/yr) tertiary domains.

Qz 16y ago

Internauts... I think everyone should start using this word.

ced 16y ago
It's already common language in French: internaute. News anchors use it frequently, and there's 7,380,000 results on Google. It sounds a bit cooler in English though.

Dobbs 16y ago

Is there any reason we can't create a new root. Then have lookup servers who have both roots. So the lookup server sees 'example.com' and checks ExampleNIC. ExampleNIC doesn't have 'example.com' and so the lookup server checks ICANN Root. If the lookup server gets 'example.other' it checks ExampleNIC and continues. This should be able to scale to a large number of alternative roots. If you move between root domains you will have to get new domain names but no one power controls the DNS system.

rbranson 16y ago
People have been trying this since the beginning of DNS, especially back in the 90s when domain names were expensive.

kragen 16y ago

China has already added some Chinese-language top-level domains to their DNS namespace. The underlying problem here is Zooko's triangle: nobody has demonstrated a global namespace that is, in Zooko's words, secure, decentralized, and human-meaningful. Centralized systems inherently have central points of failure. Approaches like dot-p2p and Telecomix do not tackle this problem and will therefore not improve the situation. There are a number of projects trying to tackle the problem by means of petnames, using non-human-meaningful identifiers in the global namespace (so they can be secure and decentralized). Git is probably the most prominent, but others include Freenet and Tahoe-LAFS, and there are quite a number of similar projects that are not yet public. Unfortunately, none of them are currently a replacement for the World-Wide Web, a problem I wrote about at some length in this unfinished essay in 2006: http://lists.canonical.org/pipermail/kragen-tol/2006-November/000841.html http://lists.canonical.org/pipermail/kragen-tol/2006-Novembe...

tankenmate 16y ago
Also remember that China's .com doesn't look the same as Verisign's.

thirdstation 16y ago

One approach to this problem is called the Handle System. http://www.handle.net/ http://www.handle.net/ It's like DNS except individual identifiers can be managed independently (imagine if example.com/foo and example.com/bar were managed by two different companies). One problem that it does not address is human-friendliness. Identifiers all start with a handle prefix that's a number like 10.1109/ or 10000.1/. Though, the latest release of the software will map DNS names to handle prefixes. It's interesting technology and quite robust. For $50 a year you can host as many handles as you want.