Re: Number of Firewall/NAT Users

[Keith Moore <moore at cs.utk.edu>]

Ed,

without getting too long-winded

- I think you're overstating the degree to which the Internet
  protocols depend on DNS (with the notable exception of NATs 
  that use DNS ALG to fake things out).  Users who aren't 
  behind NATs can still use IP addresses directly if they want to,
  and more importantly, so can their applications.

  Sending email to moore at [128.169.94.1] works just fine, and has
  worked just fine for at least 14 years.

- The flaws in DNS notwithstanding, I think you're grossly 
  understating the tremendous advantage that DNS brings to the 
  Internet.  Name-to-address mapping (via HOSTS.TXT and other
  schemes) was regarded as an essential service even before DNS;
  DNS made the job a lot more managable and has survived, what - 
  four to five orders of magnitude of growth in Internet user 
  population?  Without DNS or something like it, the Internet 
  would never have been anywhere nearly this successful.

- A service that maps names of distant resources to addresses 
  is not a local problem by any stretch of the imagination.

- I agree that the Internet architecture should not depend on DNS,
  but that doesn't mean that DNS is not an essential service.
  We might disagree about the reasons that the architecture should
  not depend on DNS - I would say that we need to be able to build
  other name lookup services that work alongside DNS (rather than 
  having to go through the existing DNS protocol) either because
  they are providing a very different service or because we might
  want to replace DNS someday.  And appliations which don't work well 
  through DNS due to performance reasons should not be constrained to 
  have to use it.

- You're grossly overstating ICANN's authority or responsibility
  in either DNS name or IP address assignment, and also the degree 
  to which IETF was able to influence the structure of ICANN.

Keith