Subject: Re: Netizen's Message (fwd)

From: Steve Bellovin <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 12 Feb 1998 17:47:22 -0500

--begin political blurb--
	A better answer to this whole problem would be to reduce the
	emphasis on DNS as a directory service, and use it for
	hierarchal canonical lookup based on the results of some other
	directory service?  DNS provides information about canonical
	names, not a mechanism for discovering any company with the
	name "ABC" in it, or for by-topic searches such as ".shop"  or
	".xxx".  Then over-burdening of the name space becomes less of
	an issue?  I still like the idea of URLs in the form
	http://www.isp.net/company/ or http://company.isp.net/.. (the
	latter seems more workable with DNSsec keying also) when the
	company has only a web presence, not direct connectivity.  With
	the increased use of firewalls and proxies, organizations often
	need only one or two exposed IPs, making company.isp.net far
	more acceptable.
	--end political blurb--

Your point about the tension between DNSsec and the existence of
aleph-null TLDs does bear further examination.  I would note further
that DNSsec is a a necessity for many uses of IPsec.

But your political blurb is wrong, at least in its last half.  It
strongly binds the company to its current ISP, making switching
providers very difficult.  It's an issue for the Web even with
directories, because of search engines (they don't traverse the
whole Web every day...), bookmarks, and the like.  And it's also
an issue for email, where directories have much less utility.

As for company.isp.net -- that was done in the early days.  UUnet
used to be in the uucp-to-Internet gateway business; often, one
sent mail to their customers as [email-masked].  (The alternative
was [email-masked], which is even uglier...)

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From: Steve Bellovin <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 12 Feb 1998 17:47:22 -0500