[unknown_error]

I think you're leeching off someone else's infrastructure and using it to do things they never meant it to do. Sure, the technical capability is there, but your use case would drastically increase their costs. You are essentially cost-shifting your customers' costs onto theirs. Not cool.

It's like building a cloud storage solution off Gmail's free storage. It can be done, has been done, but that doesn't mean it's cool to do so.

Your system would increase costs for DNS providers all over the world, without their consent, just because you're using it as a loophole. It was a problem that wasn't there fixed in a way that leeches from rather than gives back to the community.

[elliottinvent]

Thanks for your point of view, I find it really interesting.

> I think you're leeching off someone else's infrastructure

Ok, who’s the victim here? CloudFlare? Since we use their DoH end point?

Google Cloud DNS? Since that’s where we’re storing the data in DNS?

All of this is just standard DNS - CloudFlare DoH and GCDNS can be switched out for any other because it’s just vanilla DNS.

Let’s say Barclays wanted to serve out data using NUM and stored data in their own DNS zone, would they be abusing their DNS provider’s infrastructure? I don’t think so.

If we’re successful with our plans for NUM, and it becomes mainstream then surely this presents a huge opportunity for DNS providers who will have increased query costs for clients.

DNS revolvers will make their own decisions about whether they cache NUM queries (or perhaps even answer them at all) but revolvers that answer them quickly will surely have an edge on those that don’t.

> and using it to do things they never meant it to do.

The DNS is a distributed database. It’s designed to convert human friendly data to machine friendly data and I think NUM fits this perfectly. I understand not everyone shares my point of view.

> Sure, the technical capability is there, but your use case would drastically increase their costs. You are essentially cost-shifting your customers' costs onto theirs. Not cool.

It increases the costs of CloudFlare / Google? Ok, if it’s significant, they have a commercial decision to make - support full DNS as per the protocol spec, or partial-DNS where they block certain use cases.

> It's like building a cloud storage solution off Gmail's free storage. It can be done, has been done, but that doesn't mean it's cool to do so.

No, it’s not. The DNS is owned by no one and everyone.

> Your system would increase costs for DNS providers all over the world, without their consent

Most will just pass this on to domain owners, DNS query costs are peanuts - 200 USD per billion at scale.

> It was a problem that wasn't there fixed in a way that leeches from rather than gives back to the community.

I respect your point or view but think the opposite is true. We’re freeing data, opening it up for developers so that they can build things far outside the jurisdiction of the giants of the web - I think this is a fantastic way to give back to the community.

[unknown_error]

Distributed, decentralized projects are great, when they build up the infrastructure in a way that respects existing network traffic.

Yes, DNS is distributed and communal, but it's cheap only because it's minimal. Caching a few values for IP and MX lookups is relatively trivial, but if you purposefully start storing content in there, the whole network gets exponentially more expensive for everyone involved, especially once you cross a threshold where you can no longer easily send updates as simple key values and need to start worrying about encoding of larger chunks, network interruptions, checksums, etc. That complicates caching all over the DNS network. And if some DNS provides start supporting certain features and not others it's just going to lead to further fragmentation and user delays and a confusion about where and how to store and fetch data from this system depending on a user's region and likely DNS providers. It also presents authentication and integrity challenges for unencrypted uses, as in the case of DNS hijacking by local ISPs or governments.

It's a shoehorning of data into a poor fit, and only because someone else is paying for it. That's what makes this endeavor selfish, not heroic. You're not "freeing" data, just shoving it into some dark corner of the web and hoping to profit from it.

There have been a lot of actual hard work on the problem of decentralized information, from ipfs to freenet to tor to blockchains to dht... they all have thought about the problem in depth and built the infrastructure to try to make it happen, instead of leeching off someone else's work and pretending like it solves the problem.

Sorry to be harsh. This just seems like a money grab rather than technical innovation.

[elliottinvent]

Thank you. I’m very grateful for the insight into your view, that’s why I’m here.

> DNS is distributed and communal, but it's cheap only because it's minimal.

Cheap for who? Users using free resolvers or businesses using DNS service providers?

Resolvers can choose not to serve/cache NUM answers. If there’s demand for NUM data the market will decide. Google, CF, Quad9 can look after themselves.

DNS Service providers could bill by bandwidth rather than per query. Again, the market will decide.

> It also presents authentication and integrity challenges for unencrypted uses, as in the case of DNS hijacking by local ISPs or governments.

I agree but DoH, DoT, DPRIVE and other initiatives are tackling this problem.

> It's a shoehorning of data into a poor fit, and only because someone else is paying for it.

Why is it a poor fit? We’re converting a human friendly domain (or NUM URI) into machine-friendly data. That’s the whole purpose of DNS.

DNS is comfortable transferring 5kb of data, but most NUM Records will be smaller than DNSSEC responses. In fact, most NUM records are smaller than the original DNS UDP packet limit of 512.

> That's what makes this endeavor selfish, not heroic. You're not "freeing" data, just shoving it into some dark corner of the web and hoping to profit from it.

We’re making the data available to developers for free, that’s a fact. If DNS TXT records are a dark corner of the internet then I’m pleased to shed some light on that. If rules come about to stop us doing this, so be it.

> There have been a lot of actual hard work on the problem of decentralized information, from ipfs to freenet to tor to blockchains to dht... they all have thought about the problem in depth and built the infrastructure to try to make it happen

I’m a fan of them all but how many of your non-tech friends have used them? Zero.

Realistically how much have any of us used them to do useful things that make our life easier?

I really appreciate your point of view and feedback. Clearly we’re on opposite sides of this but as I said, that’s why I’m here.

[unknown_error]

Thanks for taking the feedback into consideration.