My interest was in replacing the protocol. I've grown fond of the name space, for all of its warts.
As we evolved from circuit switching to packet switching, which many at the time said it would never work, and from the HOSTS.TXT to DNS, sooner or later the “naming scheme” for resources on the net will imho in the future evolve to something better and different from DNS. No doubt for more than 25 years DNS has provided a great service, and it had many challenges and will continue for some time to do so. But DNS from being a simple way to provide name resolution evolved to something more complex, and also degenerated into a protocol/service that created a new industry when a monetary value was stuck to particular sequences of characters that require to be globally unique and the base to construct a URL. At some time in the future and when a new paradigm for the user interface is conceived, we may not longer have the end user “typing” a URL, the DNS or something similar will still be in the background providing name to address mapping but there will be no more monetary value associated with it or that value will be transferred to something else. It may sound too futuristic and inspired from science fiction, but I never saw Captain Piccard typing a URL on the Enterprise. Sooner or later, we or the new generation of ietfers and nanogers, will need to start thinking about a new naming paradigm and design the services and protocols associated with it. The key question is, when we start? Meanwhile we have to live with what we have and try to improve it as much as we can. My .02