The role of Domain Name Service
A brawl has broken out over basic regulation of high-speed Internet transport services. The parties are firmly in their camps, the filings are enormous, and the arcana of telecommunications policy is on florid display.
So I thought I’d spend a moment or two on DNS - a calm, thoughtful, placid moment.
In the Brand X decision of 2005, the Supreme Court deferred to the FCC’s determination that cable modem access should be treated as a deregulated “information service.” Part of Justice Thomas’s reasoning was that the bundling of DNS with access caused a leveling up - because DNS was involved, the whole package needed to be deregulated.
What the heck did this mean? DNS is the decentralized set of databases that allow for translation between IP addresses and domain names. It allows resources to be found by humans. You and I couldn’t communicate online without DNS. But the Commission at the time - and the Supreme Court - decided that DNS was an “information service,” akin to data-processing, and that ISPs who offered DNS look-up services together with Internet access were providing a finished product that should be deregulated.
In its recent reclassification filing, AT&T says that was absolutely the right way to go. Even if users don’t take advantage of email services, hosting, or anything else provided by the transmission company, the fact that DNS look-up is provided changes the character of the service offered from a point-to-point transmission service to a data-processing-like information service.
Public Knowledge takes a different view. From their perspective, DNS is the equivalent of routing or switching services - and thus expressly excluded from the definition of information services. It’s not data processing, they say. It’s an essential component of the basic service that is used to facilitate the movement of information. PK points out that all of the carriers advertise speeds and prices, and that these are the key elements that consumers think they’re getting when they buy high-speed Internet access.
It may turn out that a central factual dispute between these two filers is the status of DNS look-up. That’s interesting. I always thought that the Supreme Court’s fumbling around about DNS made little sense.
Okay - enjoy.
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5 Responses to “The role of Domain Name Service”
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Many of AT&T’s users never use AT&T’s DNS servers: they use ones provided by third parties such as Google Public DNS, Open DNS, and so on. Does AT&T’s type of service then change for those users? AT&T did not even mention those users in its filing, even though this mix of AT&T-DNS-using and AT&T-DNS-non-using customers clearly is relevant to their argument.
Regardless, Public Knowledge is more correct: DNS acts more as a mapping service that is useful (but not mandatory) before connection than as an information service.
well, we were able to communicate fine before paul documented in 1034/35 his work on a mechanism other than the hosttable push we did ever three days from sri. we’d names, and @sign routing, and even if we didn’t have that, we’d bang-path addressing, and fidonet and …
so there was, and still is, mechanisms for end-to-end association sufficient to support communication without the dns, or the dns supposing any particular rooted tree.
fundamentally, how is the database dip, whether to look up the nanpa terminal routing information, or to look up the ipv{4,6} address and therefore the asn and bgp prefix routing information, distinguishable? because the nanpa db is centralized and the ipv{4,6} lookup is distributed? because one is a statutory monopoly and the other is a statutory competitive market? (ok, in theory). because dialtone is cuter than modem training? because one is bidirectional flow encoded audio streams over framing and the other is … bidirectional flow supporting audio and other encodings over packets over framing.
In addition to the above points, a large majority of all name resolutions take place in the client computer using cached addresses from previous queries. And a large fraction of those queries were satisfied by dot-com nameservers operated by Verisign, not an ISP.
From Andrew McDiarmid, Policy Analyst at CDT:
“Hi Susan,
I saw your summing up of the two sides of the DNS, and wanted to pass along CDT’s comments, which delved into it too, coming out along the same lines as PK: http://cdt.org/files/pdfs/CDT_Comments-Framework_for_Broadband.pdf
I’ve been thinking the same can probably be said of DHCP, which some of the carriers are likewise arguing should require ‘leveling up.’”
To the points above, BGP is a lookup, and it comes from peering in order to get the most efficient routes to send traffic over. But, this isn’t an information service (Is anyone reading the DNS tables or BGP besides a sysadmin?)
Nor is telephone an information service just because its able to lookup where to route particular traffic. The same way pushing numbers gets you routed somewhere, typing in a URL and then matching it up against a lookup table does the exact same thing. How else would you send ANY traffic if you couldn’t say where you were going?