Everything Everywhere Daily: History, Science, Geography & More - The Domain Name System

Episode Date: March 11, 2024

Behind almost every web page, email, and podcast is a system that translates addresses understandable to humans to something which can be understood by computers.  The system is one of the foundations of the Internet, yet its origin was in a handmade list that was placed on a single computer.  Unbeknownst to the creators of the system, it would eventually affect the fortunes of entire countries.  Learn more about the Domain Name System, how it originated, and how it works, on this episode of Everything Everywhere Daily. Sponsors Sign up today at butcherbox.com/daily and use code daily to choose your free offer and get $20 off. Visit BetterHelp.com/everywhere today to get 10% off your first month. Use the code EverythingEverywhere for a 20% discount on a subscription at Newspapers.com. Subscribe to the podcast!  https://link.chtbl.com/EverythingEverywhere?sid=ShowNotes -------------------------------- Executive Producer: Charles Daniel Associate Producers: Peter Bennett & Cameron Kieffer   Become a supporter on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/everythingeverywhere Update your podcast app at newpodcastapps.com Discord Server: https://discord.gg/UkRUJFh Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/everythingeverywhere/ Facebook Group: https://www.facebook.com/groups/everythingeverywheredaily Twitter: https://twitter.com/everywheretrip Website: https://everything-everywhere.com/ Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Behind almost every webpage, email address, and podcast is a system that translates addresses understandable by humans to something that can be understood by computers. The system is one of the foundations of the internet, yet its origin was in a handmade list that was placed on a single computer. Unbeknownst to the creators of the system, it would eventually affect the fortunes of entire countries. Learn more about the domain name system, how it originated and how it works on this episode of Everything Everywhere Daily.

What if your perceptions about the past were wrong? ThruLine is a podcast that takes you back in time to uncover the parts of the story that may have gone unnoticed. It effectively turned day into night. And how it shaped the world now. Time travel with us every week on the ThruLine podcast from NPR. Even if you don't know what the domain name system is, you probably use it every day even if you don't realize it. Every time you go to a website or send an email, you're using the domain name system. A domain name is what you type into a browser or is part of an email address.

For example, my website has the domain name of everything-everywhere.com. Millions of different domain names have been registered by people, companies, governments, and organizations all around the world. To understand how the domain name system works, you need to understand the system underneath it, the Internet Protocol. The way telephone systems originally worked is that each telephone call would result in a direct connection between the two phones and the call. To achieve this, there were massive switches that would create a literal electrical connection between the phone so the parties could talk to each other. While the system worked well for point-to-point voice communication, it was not ideal for data. The first computer networks were just private networks that often connected a limited number of computers using proprietary protocols. computers in diverse locations couldn't talk to each other, both because they weren't connected

and because they didn't use the same protocol. An idea for a generalized system to network computers was proposed by the Advanced Research Projects Agency, or ARPA, of the United States Department of Defense. The proposed network would use a packet delivery system. In a packet delivery system, information is broken up into small packets of data. These small packets are then sent individually, routed through various intermediates, computers and then reassembled on the recipient computer. The networking system developed for the ARPA network, which was known as ARPANet, was known as

TCPIP, which stands for Transmission Control Protocol slash Internet Protocol. Under this protocol, each computer on the network had a unique numeric address. When a data packet is sent from a computer, it's sent to the recipient computer via intermediate computers called routers. This system worked well quite a while, and it was very robust and fall tolerant. However, there was a problem. In order to communicate with another computer, you needed to know its IP address. This was extremely confusing and difficult to know the address of every computer on the network.

The solution was very similar to the solution used by the telephone system. If you needed to make a phone call to someone whose number that you didn't know, you used a directory, usually a phone book. And for those of you too young to remember a phone book, everybody would get a book for their local area with everybody's name, address, and phone number in it. So you would look up someone's name and find out their phone number so you could call them.

The solution for ARPANET was the equivalent of a phone book for computers. The Stanford Research Institute kept a text file of all the computers on the ARPANET network with their IP addresses and they updated this list by hand. The file, which was literally called host.txte, would then be sent to various computers on the network so everyone would have a copy of the directory. The first directory called the Assigned Numbers List

was created by Elizabeth Finler, a data scientist at Stanford. It was Finler and her team that developed the idea of domains. She believed in associating computers with the type of organization that they were located in. At the time, would have mostly been done with educational institutions, government agencies, and research organizations.

So, for example, all educational institutions would be under the dot edu domain, and Stanford would be Stanford.edu. This system was fine so long as the number of computers on the network was limited. However, as the network expanded, keeping a list and manually sending it out to everyone on the network became extremely inefficient. By 1983, the system had started to become, untenable. Proposals for a solution of the problem were submitted to Paul Mocka Petrus, a researcher at the University of Southern California. He actually rejected all of those that were submitted and ended up going with his own solution, which he dubbed the domain name system. The domain name system is a hierarchical system. At the very top is what's called the root zone. If you remember my episode on the seven people

who control the internet, these people have the power to reset the root zone servers. Below are what are known as top-level domains. Some of these are ones that you're familiar with, such as dot-com, dot-net, dot-org, dot-c-o, dot-uk, and many others. Each top-level domain points to a second-level domain registered underneath it and to the computers that host those domains. In my example, Everything-Eash Everywhere is a second-level domain under the top-level.com domain. The very first top-level domain is one that you probably haven't heard of before. The dot-ARPA. The dot-ARPA top-level domain still exists, but it's only used for high-level network management,

not for websites. Second-level domains can then register information about computers under their domain. For example, if you visit Wikipedia in English, you will go to en.wikipedia.org. Wikipedia has many subdomains for each language that's covered by Wikipedia. Early in the days of the Internet, almost every website had a subdomain that started with W.W., standing for the World Wide Web. This was to distinguish their web server from their email or gopher servers. This convention has become rather dated, but you can still use WWW on most domains, and it will take you to a page on the root domain. The hierarchical nature of the domain name

system primarily has to do with what domain servers have authoritative control over each domain name. Despite being hierarchical, each of the domain servers replicates itself with other domain name servers. So if you make a change to a domain name, it can sometimes take hours for the change to replicate across most domain name servers. On your computer or smartphone, if you go into your network settings, you will see what domain name server or DNS it is pointing to. When you visit a website for the first time, your computer will query your domain name server to find out what the IP address is of the domain that you're trying to reach. This is the one computer you can't really use a domain name to reference because you need a domain name server to resolve the

domain name server. You have to use an IP address. Several large companies run public domain name servers with easy to remember IP addresses. For example, Cloudflare has 1.1.1.1.1. Google has 8.8.8.8. and a company called Quad9 runs 9.9.9.9. There are currently over 1,500 top-level domains, even though most of us are only familiar with a few of them. When the domain system started, there were only a few top-level domains, those being dot-edu.org, dot net, etc. However, over time, the number of top-level domains has expanded dramatically. At first, the creation of a dot-com domain was actually controversial because it was thought that the internet should be free of commercial influence,

which today actually seems rather cute. One of the things that was done early on was reserving two-letter top-level domains for individual countries. These domains corresponded to the two-letter codes used by the International Standard Organizations 3166-1 Alpha-2 standard. Examples of this would be dot us for the United States, dot-ca for Canada, dot UK for the United Kingdom, dot AU for Australia and dot NZ or NZ for New Zealand.

In the United States, the dot U.S. domain is reserved for government use. Each state has its own two-letter domain reserved under the U.S. domain. It is not for commercial use. In the UK, however, CO.U.K. is a very popular top-level domain for commercial use. Each country can set its own policies for what they do with their top-level domain. And this is where it gets interesting, because when top-level domains were issued to all the countries, they were issued to all the countries, not just big countries, but tiny countries as well. And some of them weren't even technically countries.

One of these countries that got a domain name was Tokalau. Tokalau has only about 1,500 people, and it's in the middle of the Pacific Ocean. You can't even fly there. You can only get there via a 24-hour boat ride. However, they have the top-level domain name. Dot-TK. They licensed the domain name to a company, which in turn offered people the chance to register domains under the dot-tK domain for free.

Tokalau made millions, and it became the preferred domain name for spammers and scammers who wanted to use something for free. Other countries got lucky and wound up with top-level domain names that had value. The Federated States of Micronesia was assigned the top-level domain name of dot-fm. and they two have made millions by licensing their dot-fm domain to radio stations around the world. Likewise, Armenia was assigned.

m., and they have also licensed their domain to radio stations, but with much less success. The tiny nation of Nauru was assigned dot ennu, which has been sold because it can be pronounced the same as new. Perhaps the biggest winner may have been Tuvalu, a tiny country with only 10,000 people, which lucked out with its dot TV domain name. Their government currently gets 8% of all its revenue from licensing the dot TV domain name. Sometimes events have to transpire to make a top-level domain name valuable.

For years, the top-level domain for the British territory of Anguilla had very little value. However, in the last few years, their domain of dot AI has found itself in high demand with artificial intelligence startups. Having a domain name can be quite valuable. Registering a domain name can cost anywhere from a few dollars to a few hundred dollars a month. However, extremely coveted domains can sell for an exorbitant amount of money.

The record sale of a domain name was $30 million for voice.com, which sold in 2019. Despite the age of the domain name system, advances and improvements are still being made. One of the biggest recent improvements has been encrypted domain name server request. Until relatively recently, even if you visited a secure website, the contents of the web page may have been secure, but the domain of the website you visited was not. The domain name system is a core component of the internet today. Whether you know it or not, you use it multiple times a day, including accessing this very podcast. Today, the domain name system keeps track of millions of computers connected to the internet all around the world. And it all started with a woman in Palo Alto, California, who kept track of every computer on the Internet by hand.

The executive producer of Everything Everywhere Daily is Charles Daniel. The associate producers are Peter Bennett and Cameron Kiefer. Today's review comes from listener W2223334 on Apple Podcasts in the United States. They write, great podcast. I listen to this podcast every day, and I'm not disappointed. Me and my dad spend countless hours on my hockey road trips listening to this. Keep up the great work, Gary. Can we get an episode on the Transatlantic Slave Trade route?

Thanks, W222-3-33-444. I've touched on the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade in several episodes, but an entire episode on the topic is certainly possible. It's a very big subject, so trying to condense it down to an episode of this podcast will require a bit of thought and work. Remember, if you leave a review or send me a boostogram, you two can have it read on the show.