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PCT-DNS Considerations

The Existing DNS system hasn't been significantly upgraded in a very long time. The implications of making any modifications to DNS brings with it an array of potential benefits; that could be enormously significant; but also, an array of risks and potential downsides.

Presently the Public Internet uses the DNS system that is governed by ICANN.

This is the underlying system that is in-turn responsible for the way through which domain names are rented.

An alternative for domains has been created by a range of Blockchain based solutions yet, these solutions are moreover considered to be categorised as components of the Web3 ecosystem, which is basically considered to be blockchain based.

After several years, works on DIDsEval has evolved to provide some form of solution that is supported by a DID Methods Registry yet, this methodology provides far less namespace than the DNS system in and of itself. These works create a bridge between Web (WWW / W3C / HTTP) based ecosystems, and those that strongly rely upon Web3 technology.

There are an array of DNS related technologies that are able to provide significant security improvements, however they are not necessarily reliably in-place nor necessarily able to work with all internet connected devices that depend upon existing ICANN related DNS systems.

A possible opportunity might be to look to create an alternative DNS solution that might be operated by the Permissive Commons Agent specifically. If this were to be considered, then it would be important that any engineered alternative did not conflict with the existing public DNS ecosystem, rather, work to seek to compliment that system; and perhaps offer some opportunity for future work to be done by others to upgrade the public DNS system to support any good ideas that may be implemented via an alternative.

One of the questions that these ideas therefore bring about is; whether or not these opportunities should be applied upon the entire permissive commons technology ecosystem for all supported usecases, or whether it should only apply for use-cases that employ webizen related technology. At present, i am unsure.

Functionality Considerations

DNS based DID like records;

In-order to support the means to address the different types of Non-HTTP(s)Protocols that may be providing permissive commons assets, an idea is that the creation of new DNS records might provide a capacity to provide support for these sorts of requirements.

This would in-turn provide a means to support discovery of resources that are supported by the host as determined by the DNS records. If this were to be developed, new types of DNS records or a schema to define how these new types of DNS records would need to be defined.

WebID-DNS

The WebID ecosystem is defined elsewhere. Whilst there may be other considerations relating to the approach for making use of WebID or WebID like technologies; it may well be that the use of a domain name record to denote a particular entity is a potentially useful way to support a means to provide related semantics and in-turn also, support for authentication.

Yet, this would in-turn infer the use of particular types of cryptographic instruments to support the underlying requirements associated with any such approach; also, any content that may be encoded in a manner that defines the namespace, should also be temporally considered - ensuring the relationship between any such domain-name holder, and any authors / human agents; is able to be informatically supported (ie: correct inferences) overtime.

The other factor relating to this type of methodology is that it would therefore be preferred that the domain name used, is not rented but rather owned by whatever legal entity relates to the informatics use of that domain name as a legal entity related identifier.

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Last updated on 1/19/2023