The Duct Tape Holding the Internet Together (2017)

In the events anyone thinks that:

1. Recent shenanigans of DNS registries are anything new.

2. The recommendation to "host your services (Web, mail, etc.) on your own domain" addresses all the sharecropping and homesteading problems of SaaS / FAANG based solutions.

3. Any of this scales to the level of more than a minuscule fraction of the population deploying their own systems on their own domain namespace.

The evidence suggests flaws in this thinking.

I've been revisiting the history, motivations, and assumptions behind the domain name system as it was first being discussed, in 1973, 46 years ago. There's a good compendium of relevant RFCs here:

https://livinginternet.com/i/iw_dns_history.htm

Though strongly recommend going to the source RFCs themselves, starting with RFC 606:

http://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc606.txt

Also: 608, 623, 625, 805, 810, 811, 819, 830, 881, 882, and 883.

And for a set of recent related stories:

There's the dot-org self-dealing fraud / corruption, with a compilation by dang (and others) of HN submissions here:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21668003

Brian Krebs on obtaining a .gov domain:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21644857

Susam's "Sinkholed" story of having a domain appropriated by Shadowserver:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21700139

And a set of searches for lost, stolen, or hijacked domains:

https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...

https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...

https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...

"How we nearly lost our domain, and how to prevent this"

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19322966

Kissmetrics has either sold or lost control of their domain, with no warning

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17416996

"Ask HN: Host Gator Hijacked my domain name. What should I do?"

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4968233

"Domain Hijacking with a Fax"

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6535904

"How to get a stolen domain back?"

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3873004

... and many more.

I'd posted a thread to Mastodon a week or so back asking if we're simply doing DNS wrong for the current era. Though getting it right would be a challenge.

https://mastodon.cloud/@dredmorbius/103184864263833546

Revisiting the foundations (see the LivingInternet link in my earlier comment) might be useful. Not because they're correct, necessarily, but to examine them for flawed or no-longer-valid presumptions.