On 12/18/15 2:33 AM, Christian de Larrinaga wrote:

Actually DNS is not working for most of the Internet either, witness we don't have names resolving to the billions and approaching trillions of devices and applications services at the edge of data networks.

I've never heard that claim before. I've run experiments with DNS and found surprisingly few limits on how far it can expand. (For example, in one experiment [more than a decade ago] we ran Bind with tens of millions of top level domains and then ran query traffic [in which we mixed a fair amount of absent names to make it more real-life.])

Sad fact is DNS designed in an era of big iron...

DNS was designed in the mid 1980's, and the biggest of computers we had back then are overmatched even by rather small devices of today. The laptop I'm using to type this makes the Crays I used (for magnetic confinement fusion simulations) seem rather weak.

However, there is an intriguing side vector, which is that DNS is fading as a user-visible technology.

This does not mean that DNS is going to disappear, rather that it is being submerged to become an internal internet name/address technology. IP and MAC addresses used to be far more visible to users. They became submerged under DNS names. DNS is now following that path and being submerged under URI based names and application-local names (such as Facebook names, hashtags, Twitter handles, etc.) Even URI names that contain long DNS names and index data are being submerged under shortened names. I anticipate that attribute-based naming systems will come to dominate in certain areas (I am sure, however, that if one were to look inside such systems that DNS names will be there serving as internal machinery.)

There is at least one of the new top level domain offerings that is based on the idea that this kind of DNS submergence is happening. It's (partial) focus is on DNS names used to located technical resources; the human semantics of the names is not particularly important because it isn't humans who are uttering those DNS names. On the other hand, because a flexible human has been supplanted by embedded firmware, the value of long term persistence of a DNS name is more important than cute words that such a name might contain.

--karl--