[ih] History of Naming on The Internet - is it still relevant?

[Karl Auerbach]

Naming on the net is becoming far more complex in several dimensions.

Here's links to a couple of things I wrote about this.

The first is a note (to the National Research Council study to which 
Patrik referred) that questions some assertions that are made about DNS 
and the notion of a Global Uniform Internet Name Space.  (I discuss 
things like location, client, and temporal invariance, none of which 
actually apply to DNS.)  The note has lots of other material, the part 
about invariance begins with the heading "Chasing the Chimera of the 
Global Uniform Internet Name Space" on the 4th slide.

As the net takes on some aspects of long-term information storage - like 
the wonderful Internet Archives or Carl Malamud's amazing efforts - we 
may need to consider ways to lock-down names and their links to the 
content in ways that resist erosion, cancellation, usurpation, change, 
or manipulation.  We may also need to consider name versus attribute 
based modes of finding and connecting to things on the net (some of our 
search engines may be evolving towards the latter.)

https://www.cavebear.com/archive/rw/nrc_presentation_july_11_2001.pdf

The second is a note about the question of "what are we naming?" This is 
particularly an issue in modern applications in which the network 
partner of a client may move, split, or merge during a client-service 
interaction (and thus take on different IP addresses and port numbers 
[and different transport connections] as that interaction progresses 
over time.)  (This is why I am so fond of the idea of an association 
protocol layer between applications and our transport layers.)  The 
ISO/OSI folks may have wrestled with this via things like "application 
entity titles", but they didn't do a very good job of expressing the 
problem they were trying to solve or their solutions.

https://www.cavebear.com/archive/public/cloud-entities.pdf

         --karl--


On 7/20/25 1:34 AM, Patrik Fältström via Internet-history wrote:
> On 19 Jul 2025, at 19:55, Jack Haverty via Internet-history wrote:
>
>> So, my question is -- How has the Internet mechanisms for Naming evolved over the last 55 years, from the Users' perspective?   Is Naming even still relevant on The Internet?
> There are different things hidden in what you ask for. Names, addresses and identifiers. Being able to identify and access individual items, the ability for you to refer to something and have that referral be stable over time, and over geography (you give the identifier to me).
>
> A good report that I helped writing with many others many years ago (in 2005) I think expresses this in a still very good way:
>
> National Research Council. Signposts in Cyberspace: The Domain Name System and Internet Navigation. Washington, DC, USA: The National Academies Press, 2005. ISBN: 978-0-309-09640-9
> https://nap.nationalacademies.org/catalog/11258/signposts-in-cyberspace-the-domain-name-system-and-internet-navigation
>
> A presentation from RIPE-50 can be found here: https://ripe50.ripe.net/presentations/ripe50-plenary-mond-signposts-cyberspace.pdf
>
> With that as a background, I think your additional "spice", "from the User's perspective", is very interesting.
>
> What does that mean?
>
> ;-)
>
> Patrik -- also using AI for many things that I yesterday did use search engines (or guessed), and before that books
>
>