

The end of a single global namespace? - unicornporn
http://christopherkullenberg.se/?p=1936

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kragen
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-Novembe...](http://lists.canonical.org/pipermail/kragen-
tol/2006-November/000841.html)

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

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crocowhile
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.

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qjz
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).

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crocowhile
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.

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stcredzero
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)

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Qz
_Internauts_... I think everyone should start using this word.

~~~
ced
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.

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thirdstation
One approach to this problem is called the Handle System.

<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.

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Dobbs
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.

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

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tomjen3
Unlikely. Most likely we will end up with something like Freenet. I can't
decide if that is a good thing or not.

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borism
But you already decided: _"most likely we will end up with something like
Freenet"_

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khafra
I re-read tomjen3's comment 3 times and couldn't find a value judgement, only
a prediction. Where is the value judgement?

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borism
Freenet is known as not exactly your ideal freedom-of-information situation,
with most content reportedly being child pornography.

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khafra
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.

