The Domain Name System (DNS) doesn’t get the respect it deserves.  It’s a remarkably robust and massively distributed database comprised of a global network of servers constantly updating each other as to the mapping of human-readable domain names (such as digitalmissive.com) to machine-readable IP addresses.

It’s also arguably the glue holding this whole internet contraption of ours together.

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We’ve written about DNS before – how important it is, how remarkably well it works, how often it’s attacked, and how taken for granted it is by the general public.

As such, last week’s announcement that Google is getting into the DNS business is worth paying some attention to (historically, DNS has been provided for at the Internet Service Provider level, but there’s no intrinsically technical requirement to do so).

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I’ve already written a few times (here and here) about DNS.

Why?

A concerted effort to drive readers away with dry technical information about internet plumbing, possibly?

No,  it’s because I don’t think DNS gets the love and respect it deserves – either for its sheer technical coolness as a massively replicated global peer-to-peer data structure, or for its vital importance to The Internet As We Know It.
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Historically, administration of the internet (that same internet that now supports billions of dollars of e-commerce) has been a remarkably communal, non-commercial endeavor, depending on a loose collection of several multinational government research agencies and non-profit corporations.  That such a non-centralized and flat coalition of groups and interested individuals could successfully manage the astronomical scaling up of the internet we’ve witnessed over the last few decades is truly amazing, yet largely taken for granted.

These days, though, one of the primary long-term trends we’re seeing is the emergence of the Content Delivery Network – in essence, a privatized internet.  The growth of these additional proprietary layers is primarily driven by technological considerations – both internet video and cloud computing are placing demands on the internet Vint Cerf could not have imagined.

However, the end result could well be the marginalization of today’s egalitarian public internet (we’ve already touched on the growing presence of proprietary content delivery networks and Google’s pursuit of transcontinental fiber here, and on the resulting implications for Net Neutrality here).

CDNs and proprietary backbone links both represent workarounds of the public internet routing structure, but there’s another part of the internet undergoing similar changes: the Domain Naming System (DNS).   While routing is all about numeric IP addresses, DNS is about mapping these unfriendly numeric addresses (such as “216.239.113.101” or “2001:0db8:85a3:0000:0000:8a2e:0370:7334” in the case of IPv6) to more human-appropriate names such as “digitalmissive.com”.  In other words, DNS is essentially a massively distributed database – yet one the fulfills an absolutely crucial function, if you think about it.

However, as impressive as DNS is, it’s also a key point of vulnerability – if you want to see what a jungle it is out there on the internet, just try maintaining your own publicly exposed  DNS server and watch the attacks launched against it (trust me on that one).  Furthermore, it’s not a very transparent system, and any changes made to a DNS record can take over a day to fully propagate across the entire system.  It only follows then, that as with routing, proprietary DNS systems would emerge, representing the next step in the ongoing privatization of the internet.  And so we have Dynamic DNS and firms such Dynect.  Dynect offers enterprises using distributed cloud computing applications a highly optimized private dynamic DNS system – including additional features such as load balancing, traffic management, and failover.  As with CDNs, all this functionality is localized to the end user via Dynect’s geographically diverse network of data centers, to help minimize exposure to the increasingly strained and messy public internet cloud.

Clearly, there are sound technological reasons for the emergence of these additional privatized layers of the internet.  As for what it means in terms of the nature of the internet itself going forward, I’m less sure.

Any thoughts?