Sure, but replacing the Internet Domain Name System is much easier said than done. That was the concensus yesterday at the annual Computers, Freedom and Privacy conference. But speakers in a roundtable were in general agreement about several points.
The DNS essentially is the way that an Internet name, such as SILICONVALLEY.COM, is made unique on the Net so that when you type “http://www.siliconvalley.com” in to your browser you are taken to that site and only that site (and when you send me mail to “dgillmor@sjmercury.com” it reaches me). That domain names gets translated into numbers, also known as IP (Internet Protocol) addresses.
The DNS was a marvel of ingenuity when it was invented, and worked brilliantly when the Net was mostly universities and government sites. In today’s commercial world it’s becoming a mess. Big companies, in particular, have turned the system into a giant land-grab — part of a larger land grab in the intellectual property arena — and have been abusive of the less powerful in the process.
The system is also based on a hierarchy, and therefore centralized. The hierarchical nature of the DNS isn’t so much the problem as the centralization, which gives the U.S. government and its proxy, the notorious Network Solutions Inc., a powerful choke hold over the system. NSI is a particularly nasty outfit, in my view.
Lenny Foner, from the MIT Media Lab, was a leader of the DNS session here. He handed out a proposal for replacing the system, noting that it won’t be easy. He suggests getting rid of the DNS and replacing it with a system that is not hierarchical and has several qualities:
The system would rely on individual machines around the world to establish “relationships,” in effect, with nearby computers. Mine would learn about yours, which would tell a third about both, etc. (It’s actually much more complicated, but you get the general idea if I do, and I hope I do. I’ll post a link to Foner’s paper when he posts it on the Net, which he promises to do.) Names would no longer be unique, and you wouldn’t always be able to get to a named site without more information. Land grabs would be harder, because the grabbing would be much more expensive. People could register an unlimited number of names at no cost to them. Routing of IP traffic wouldn’t be affected.
Several people at the discussion said getting rid of DNS isn’t as much a matter of replacing it as building on top of it or around it until DNS is someday not needed anymore. That seemed sensible.
Nor is a hierarchical system necessarily so bad, said John Gilmore of the Electronic Frontier Foundation. After all, it does work well to sort out various names.
To put it mildly, this is one tough problem. The reality is that big companies, which can exert strong control over their brands in cyberspace — and unfairly wipe out small fry that have the same name in a different context — like that system just fine for the moment even if it’s inconvenient at times.
One proposal now in the works would add numerous “Top Level Domains” to the three mainly used today — .com, .net and .org, all of which NSI controls much too strongly. For example, we might have a .union level for the labor movement, and a .consumer level for people to comment on companies’ products, etc. I’d like to see thousands, if not more, of new top level domains.
I’m working on a long column on this subject, and would like to hear your ideas. Please let me know what you think.
Code is Speech
An appeals court has ruled that computer programs are speech (News.com story), not weapons. This is a huge victory for civil liberties.