| 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. |
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.