On Mon, May 21, 2007 at 03:08:06PM +0000, Chris L. Morrow wrote: [snip]
This is sort of the point of the NRIC document/book... 'we need to find/make/use a directory system for the internet' then much talk of how "dns was supposed to be that but for a number of reasons it's not, google/<insert favorite search engine> is instead"
Um, no. DNS became the defacto 'directory' prior to the rise of decent search engines. The directory that was contracted and 'supposed to' exist as part of the NNSC-to-InterNIC dance was to be built by old-ATT Labs. As far as I can recall, it was ever only an ftp repository and not much of a 'directory and database service' (corrections welcome). The problem was a classic case of top-down thinking (we will dictate this glacially slow entity will cook The Directory and The Database and decide what gets published and when) crashing into a very dynamic market with a clever and impatient population (we won't wait - DS and IS aren't fast enough ... this RS thing is Good Enough). An obvious catalyst was commercialization of domains. Which interestingly enough leads us back to the lack of categories and naming morass in which we live. I find it quite humourous that new 'restrictive membership' branches of the tree are now being proposed as a solution to the problem of identity (eg, .bank to "solve" phishing). Unless there will be some level of enforcement teeth, we will see the same situtaion that played out in 94/95: tech: "no sir, you can't have .net as you're not a network provider" customer: "the guy down the street will do it!" tech's boss: (weighs non-extistent penalties versus $s, doesn't care what 'good of the Internet' or 'sullied reputaion' means) "competative disadvantage! must!" Pushing an issue around to different points on the tree doesn't eliminate it. Cheers, Joe -- RSUC / GweepNet / Spunk / FnB / Usenix / SAGE