Can I summarize the current round of objections to my admittedly off-beat proposal (use basically URLs rather than IP addresses in IP packet src/dest) as:
We can't do that! It would require changing something!
Nope. You can summarize it as "it doesn't scale", which is what has killed endless numbers of superficially plausible bad ideas. Like I said, if there were a few thousand URLs it could work, but with hundreds of millions or billions, not a chance. Numbers with five zeros and numbers with nine zeros are not the same. But while we're proposing bad ideas, how about this one: we pull the domain name out of the URL and flip it around and put it at the front, so instead of https://badidea.com/crud we have "com.badidea/https://crud." Now we can do hierarchical routing, starting with the "com" and then "com.badidea", shoving the DNS resolution into the router. There's only a few thousand top level domains, so routers should he able to handle this with no problem. Whaddaya think? Regards, John Levine, johnl@taugh.com, Primary Perpetrator of "The Internet for Dummies", Please consider the environment before reading this e-mail. https://jl.ly