Re: [wg-c] Re: nine principles for domain names

[Karl Auerbach <karl@CaveBear.com>]

> 1. We do believe that the assumption that all gTLDs will/should stand for
> something is valid. The alternative is to not bother with a gTLD and use
> only the IP address.

One of the prime purposes of DNS is to provide a relatively unchanging
"handle" to reference a host interface (IP address), mail exchanger, H.323
IP phone number, etc etc.

As such DNS is a "level of indirection".

One could dispense with the DNS layer and have things map *directly* to IP
addresses, IP phone numbers, etc but that would indice massive thrashing
of those databases because IP addresses do change many orders of magnitude
more frequently than do the DNS names.

This layer of indirection is the main virtue of DNS.  The fact that humans
have (temporarily) been involved in typing in DNS names, which has caused
all of this debate, is merely an ancillary characteristic of DNS.  And the
end of that human relationship with DNS is something that will slowly and
substantially diminish as true directory services become more of a true
layer rather than the manually-invoked side-lookup that they are today.

As such, there is absolutely no value in having DNS names "stand for
something" in a semantic sense.  As far as providing a stable handle is
concerned "ui56pwz.uym23.q3z" is just as valid as "www.cavebear.com", the
software does not care.

And when one says "stand for something" one is saying something about the
linguistic context of a human user.  And given the billions of people on
this planet who speak non-European languages, any choice of linguistic
context is necessarily going to be the wrong choice for a significant part
of the world's population.

		--karl--