It would be great if we could solve the problem by backing up and addressing a few preliminary things first. Like, DNS is a very old protocol, and it's a good p

It would be great if we could solve the problem by backing up and addressing a few preliminary things first. Like, DNS is a very old protocol, and it's a good protocol. But will we keep using it this way 100 years from now? It may be counter-productive to only focus on backwards-compatible fixes. Domain registration and name serving are pretty similar, yet we treat them very differently. For both security reasons and functional reasons, it would be nice if we had one unified way to manage them both. Other services depend greatly on DNS names, like PKI. It would be very advantageous, again for security and functional reasons, if there were better (not necessarily tighter, but better) integration between the two. Secure connections all pretty much share the same properties. Virtually every system you can think of can be thought of as one that (at some point) requires authentication, authorization, encryption, and data integrity. So, perhaps there is a unified way we can provide all of this, the same way TCP and UDP provide a unified way of transporting either streams or datagrams. Maybe even making them OS primitives the way the TCP/IP stack is today [didn't used to be!]. If we step back and start from first principles, and design protocols that provide all the functionality we know we need (now and in the future), we could start getting ready for computing in the next century and beyond. It doesn't have to be a pipe dream, especially if we start building support for experimental protocols into devices today.