I think Bill's point was that if a distributed database is required to contain routing policy, why not use existing distributed database infrastructure to host it (i.e. the DNS). In this context, deployment of LDAP-accessible databases (which you advocate) is "replicating the DNS" (which you mention you don't want to do).

No it's not. This LDAP-based solution is leaving the DNS alone rather than trying to stuff more and more functionality on it. DNS will not be replicated and will not be replaced. It will, however, be used as an integral part of locating appropriate LDAP servers to query. Read this draft for an idea of how this might work. If you haven't time to read the whole thing then just look at section 7. http://www.ehsco.com/misc/draft-ietf-crisp-lw-core-00.txt And there is an IETF working group called CRISP that is discussing this stuff. -- Michael Dillon