RE: summarising [was: Re: ICANNs role]

[<michael.dillon () bt com>]

> Again - DNS is the infrastructure for EVERYTHING.  It facilitates
> EVERYTHING.

Not so. On the public Internet applications like Edonkey and Emule work
fine without it. We run a global IP network that is not connected to the
public Internet and over 90% of our customers' applications don't use
any DNS. They use IP addresses directly.

DNS is only a facilitator for those applications that WANT to use it.
And even though most current applications want to use DNS, they usually
function just fine with straight IP addresses. DNS is more of a habit,
than a necessity.

If the users of the Internet, collectively, decide that DNS is a bad
habit, better to be avoided, then you will see more and more
applications that work around the DNS. Like ICQ. Or they will only use
the DNS minimally in order to root their own namespaces, like LDAP with
RFC 2247.

--Michael Dillon