begin  quoting John Oliver as of Wed, Jun 21, 2006 at 10:16:50AM -0700:
> On Tue, Jun 20, 2006 at 05:33:46PM -0700, Andrew Lentvorski wrote:
> > As for the web, I'm not as sure.  Most people rely on portals, bookmarks 
> > and search engines.  Of those, only bookmarks are sensitive to DNS 
> > failure because they are statically encoded by address.  If search 
> > engines started returning IP address URL's, necessary DNS traffic would 
> > start dropping off pretty fast.
> 
> If DNS went away and the answer, even short-term, was "Use IPs
> instead!", 

Well... pass around hosts.txt.

How big would hosts.txt be these days?  I read somewhere (can't recall)
that there were ~400 million hosts on the 'Net.

Building up a list of "favorite" sites wouldn't be hard at all.

>            we'd have an enormous issue in that hundreds of thousands of
> web sites that use Host Headers would all be screeching for IP
> addresses.

Maybe. Maybe not.

Seems like we'd have a quick fix.  Instead of

http://foo.bar.tld/qux
http://meep.baz.tld/quux

we'd have

http://123.45.67.89/foo.bar.tld/qux
http://123.45.67.89/meep.baz.tld/quux

...in a matter of hours.

>             Talk about IPv4 exhaustion issues!  The sudden increase in
> core routing table entries for all of those new IP addresses wouldn't
> help, either.

Hm... that would imply that we're not ready for IPv6, either.

> Email wouldn't be helped by the loss of MX records, either.
 
Bang paths!

I can see Google doing well by stepping into the breach. "Bang-path
through us! We know just about where everyone is!"

> Killing DNS absolutely will kill "the Internet", at least as far as the
> vast majority of Joe Sixpack users view it.

For the ones who berate the ISP for "your Internet is broke" every time
they forget to plug in their cable-modem, yeah. But somehow, I can't see
that as significant... sure, it's a lot of money, and yeah, they're the
marks that allow an ISP to make a profit and stay in business. But still,
it's not like any content is actually *destroyed*.

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