DNS Evolution: Innovation or Fragmentation?

There is no single name system that is necessarily bound to the Internet. Unlike IP addresses which are in every IP packet, names are an application construct, and, in theory, applications have considerable latitude in how they handle such names. There could be many name systems that could coexist within…


Fragmentation

One of the discussion topics at the recent ICANN 75 meeting was an old favourite of mine, namely the topic of Internet Fragmentation. Here, I’d like to explore this topic in a little more detail and look behind the kneejerk response of declaiming fragmentation as bad under any and all…


Sender Pays

In September 2012 ETNO, the European Telecommunications Networks Operators’ Association, or most notably Deutsche Telekom and France Telecom and fellow legacy telcos in Europe published a contribution to the 2012 World Conference in International Telecommunications (WCIT-12) with a proposal for regulatory reform that in ETNO’s words would compel content providers…


A Second Look at QUIC Use

A couple of months ago, in July 2022, I wrote about our work in measuring the level of use of QUIC in the Internet (https://www.potaroo.net/ispcol/2022-07/quic.html). Getting this measurement “right” has been an interesting exercise, and it’s been a learning experience that I’d like to relate here. We’ll start from the…


DoH, DoT and Plain old DNS

The evolution of the DNS name resolution environment has seen the DNS recursive resolver moving further away from the end client, with an Internet segment often being interposed between the client and the recursive resolver. The combination of an open DNS protocol and a public Internet segment between the client…


Bigger, Faster, Better (and Cheaper!)

Let’s take a second to look back some 50 years to the world of 1972, and the technology and telecommunications environment at that time. The world of 1972 was one populated by a relatively small collection of massive (and eye-wateringly expensive) mainframe computers that were tended by a set of…


Notes from IETF 114

IETF 114 was held in the last week of July 2022 as a hybrid meeting, with the physical meeting being held in Philadelphia. Here’s my notes on topics that attracted my interest from the week. IEPG The IEPG meetings are held each Sunday prior to the IETF week. These days…


Notes from DNS-OARC-38

As I see it, the DNS is the last remaining piece of glue that binds the Internet together. We lost IP address coherency within the Internet many years ago and the DNS is all that’s left. Consequently, the DNS is vital for the Internet. Perhaps the most critical question to…


A look at QUIC Use

Quick UDP Internet Connection (QUIC) is a network protocol initially developed and deployed by Google, and recently (May 2021) standardized in the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) (RFC 9000). In this article we’ll take a quick tour of QUIC and then look at the extent to which QUIC is being…


Content vs Carriage – Who Pays?

There was a common catch cry in the early 1990’s that “the Internet must be free!” Some thought this was a policy stance relating to rejection of imposed control over content. Others took this proposition more literally as in “free, like free beer!” It might sound naive today but there…