1. DNS: History and Current Issues
EE DNS Forum / UADOM
2 December 2016
Note that this is the first EEDOM meeting
Congratulate Ukraine on evolving UADOM to EEDOM

2. Presentation outline Prologue: Birth of the Internet
The DNS: A Short History
The DNS: Current Status and Issues
Domain Name Industry Challenges
Who Runs the Internet, and How?
First let me tell you what I will talk about

3. Prologue: Birth of the Internet
1969 – 4 universities in the U.S. linked
Packet networks, NCP, 256 hosts maximum
development of TCP/IP
1983: scheduled overnight change to TCP/IP
256 hosts to 4 billion IPv4 addresses (now insufficient)
Parallel evolution of an Internet culture
More recently, rapid and explosive growth
Cerf: An experiment that escaped the laboratory
I start with a historical perspective because often what exists
In the present is best understood in the context of the past.
This culture is important, and is characterized by cooperation,
Collaboration and creating and sharing knowledge and information.
Now declining in strength somewhat, but still quite important.
Cooperative culture caused security issues to be taken too lightly

4. The DNS: A Short History
John Postel and the hosts.txt file
Paul Mockapetris and birth of DNS – 1983 –87
gTLDs and ccTLDs
Privatization of names: Network Solutions 1993–4
Birth of ICANN: 1996 – 1998
Mandate for security, stability and resilience
First expansion, name space: 2000 (.biz, .info …)
Second expansion: 2004 (.asia, .mobi, .travel, ... .xxx)
Second expansion: 2008 – present
IDNs: “Internationalized” domain names
DNS –a global distributed database, tree structured. Unified data
base but administratively decentralized
Ricardo – in discussion on the role of scarcity in economics
Buy land, they aren’t making any more of it
Cyberspace and the “name space”

5. The DNS: Current Status and Issues
Current size and distribution
About 350 million names
IDNs, Unicode but not Universal Acceptance (yet)
DN industry and market not fully understood
CCT – competition study now being completed by ICANN
Implications of private sector leadership
Many registries, many policies
Semantic issues, consumer confusion
Intellectual property issues
Of existing names, many parked (held for speculative purposes or
for later use). Major secondary markets in popular top level gTLDs
Help expand market by working to advance UA
in mail, web clients and applications
DNI still in adolescence, evolving in ways we can’t foresee.

6. Domain Name Industry Challenges
Security weaknesses
Exploitation by ‘cybercrime industry’
Eventual saturation, level/decreasing demand
Replacement by other identifier systems
Use of search makes URLs transparent
Alternate roots
Digital Object Architecture and the Handle System
5G mobile addressing
Intergovernmental takeover
We in the DNI are learning as we go, industry and Internet use
expanding very rapidly, and it’s not possible to foresee
all issues that will emerge
Problem is that expansion is driven by private sector, and so
serious issues may be homeless (temporarily or for a long time)
until their importance is recognized and they are either claimed
or assigned.
Example is hijacking of IOT nodes
Due to weakness of initial IOT environment

7. Who Runs the Internet, and How?
Voluntary cooperative efforts
The I* organizations: ISOC, ICANN, IETF, RIRs, W3C …
Emergence of the “multistakeholder model”
ICANN as ‘coordinator’ of domain name industry
Mandate: ensure security, stability and resiliency of Internet with respect to its addressing identifiers
ICANN emerging independent from IANA transition
Success depends upon community actions
Engage in ICANN policy process
Shaping the future now
Let’s put this discussion into an organizational context now.
Administration of Internet has been hugely successful in general
Scaling from 256 to billions of nodes (thanks IETF!)
Voluntary cooperative efforts have worked
MSM a new form of admin/governance
recognize differences exist among stakeholder groups
offers arena to resolve competing differences
success depends upon shared goal and MS structure
no guarantee of closure, progress
I* participation offers such a structure which is working
Critical role of consumer/user trust
Need healthy domains industry
Hope that meeting provides an appreciation and understanding of our
interdependencies as a DNI and as a large Internet community

8. DNS: History and Current Issues
With that, I return the parole to __________