3 ms·

DNS is, today, distributed and open source. What is it about DNS that would solve this problem specifically?

• EGreg 6y ago
  DNS is good but it is a federated database, and thus the root is controlled by one one organization (ICANN) with 7 keys. And below that, the tlds are controlled by organizations — .org was recently almost sold. But that’s not really the main issue. The main issue is this whole way we think about the Web is propped up by DNS. Facebook.com is the root domain for a lot of brand pages and profiles. Why? They built the software and you don’t have it. Then they ran the server farm and infrastructure. You would not think like this is we used hashes and DHTs instead of human readable URLs prefixed by facebook.com There’s a “well-known” Bill Gates and he’s the “real, verified” Bill Gates. We can email him at billg@microsoft.com ... why? Why should he get all this SPAM from being famous? The alternative is just having a Distributed Hash Table / Kademlia type routing (“magnet links”) DNS is only good for quickly getting you to a tiny subset of resources on the web, namely the front pages of sites that are easy to spell. That’s just a glorified search engine. It can have competition. In fact, many non technical people typethe domain into the google search box. Any resources can be addressed by QR codes, hyperlinks on the Web or Javascript variables containing links. Titles and metadata can be cached. And so on. The PKI may still have to be a federated system for now but the search engine doesn’t have to be.