this post was submitted on 15 Nov 2024
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Because if they're not owned, then how do you know who is who? How do we independently conclude that yup,
microsoft.comgoes to Microsoft, without some central authority managing who's who?It's first come first served which is a bit biased towards early adopters, but I can't think of a better system where you go to
google.comand reliably end up at Google. If everyone had a different idea of where that should send you it would be a nightmare, we'd be back to passing IP addresses on post-it notes to your friends to make sure we end up on the sameyoutube.com. When you type an address you expect to end up on the site you asked, and nothing else. You don't want to end up on Comcast YouTube because your ISP decided that's whereyoutube.comgoes, you expect and demand the real one, the same as everyone else.And there's still the massive server costs to run a dictionary for literally the entire Internet for all of that to work.
A lot of the times, when asking those kinds of questions, it's useful to think about how would you implement it such that it would work. It usually answers the question.
Thanks for answering! I was more wondering what kind of issue DNS solved and why it was solved that way. Also if anyone thought of another solution.
I also read the history here (https://cyber.harvard.edu/icann/pressingissues2000/briefingbook/dnshistory.html), and it still seems pretty sketchy to me that the concern of website names being inaccessible to small businesses and such was solved with the ICANN. Didn't this just make domain names into stuff you could speculate with? I may be tweaking rn, but I don't think it's necessarily right.
The issue DNS solves is the same as the phone book. You could memorize everyone's phone number/IP, but it's a lot easier to memorize a name or even guess the name. Want the website for walmart? Walmart.com is a very good guess.
Behind the scenes the computer looks it up using DNS and it finds the IP and connects to it.
The way it started, people were maintaining and sharing host files. A new system would come online and people would take the IP and add it to their host file. It was quickly found that this really doesn't scale well, you could want to talk to dozens of computers you'd have to find the IP for! So DNS was developed as a central directory service any computer can request to look things up, which a hierarchy to distribute it and all. And it worked, really well, so well we still use it extensively today. The desire to delegate directory authority is how the TLD system was born. The host file didn't use TLDs just plain names as far as I know.
At least in windows, the hosts file can point from any domain to any IP. In theory you can do things like point advertising domains to 127.0.0.1 if you wanted to make sure web requests never made it off your local machine. I did this a lot back in the day to test websites running locally but pointed to a friendlier name than localhost:randomport