Why Any Competing Whois Registry Model Is Doomed

CowboyRobot writes "In Paul Vixie's latest essay, he argues that the alternative to the Whois registry model is flawed and that we should be learning from the mistakes of the history of proposed alternatives to the DNS. 'Any proposal for a competing Whois registry model is as doomed by design and destiny as every alternative DNS system. Even if it succeeds at first, it would fail after copycatting occurred.'"

Namecoin

[Anonymous Coward]

A distributed domain name system exists. Right now. Today.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Namecoin

td;dr: Unique, abitrary and distributed

[vivaoporto]

Here is the tl;dr version for the ones that won't read TFA:

You can't have a distributed system that creates an unique and arbitrary resource without cooperation between the peers. Without communication among them there will be duplication. People that think it is possible are fools.

Re:I dont follow

[Anonymous Coward]

This 'who' actaully built some credibility... http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_Vixie

Re:Vixie Cron

[eln]

He also wrote BIND, which had one of the most breathtakingly awful security records of any single piece of software for many years (the years during which he was the primary author, oddly enough). For a while there, it seemed CERT was issuing advisories for some new vulnerability in BIND that would grant root access to your entire network on a daily basis.

Re:There can be only one

[Smallpond]

It had to be said

No it didn't. Everything in the internet is designed to be distributed. There is no reason why you can't have multiple DNS trees. If one maps aaa.example.com to 192.168.0.1 and the other maps it to 192.222.0.1 nothing breaks. They are just different namespaces. Go ahead and yell and scream that every domain must map to one and only one IP but the truth is that it doesn't. The internet would still function, just differently then some people expect it to. Obviously if I want to follow a link on your web page then I need to follow it in your namespace, but that's an implementation detail.

ISPs already know that multiple namespaces don't break anything. Why do you think they're all cashing in on NXDOMAIN pages?

Many companies do split horizon DNS. Internal address lookups give different views than external ones, and sometimes the same domain has different addresses.

So if an alternate DNS shows up that returns the same results as the ICANN DNS except it doesn't block access to sites that the US Gov doesn't like, then what's the problem? And if it creates a new TLD and sells addresses for half the cost of the .com addresses, what's the problem with that? People using the legacy DNS won't see the blocked addresses or the new addresses, but nothing bad happens to them.