DONA

Having read "A Data-Oriented (and Beyond) Network Architecture" from the 2007 SIGCOMM, I am both intrigued and skeptical about the idea. Intrigued because I think this could be an interesting way to route data over a network and avoid connection loss, but a bit skeptical because I fear the increased complexity for the user may prevent its adoption. Granted, these may be somewhat naive thoughts, but here they are anyway:

From the article: "Today, however, the vast majority of Internet usage is data
retrieval and service access, where the user cares about content
and is oblivious to location. That is, the user knows that she wants
headlines from CNN, or videos from YouTube, or access to her
bank account, but does not know or care on which machine the
desired data or service resides." This is true; the users, by and large, just want to get at the content their interested in, wherever it resides. One could probably extend this mindset and say that the users just want to have an easy way to get to content.

The problem I see is briefly addressed later in the paper:
"...How will users learn these
flat, long, and user-unfriendly names? We expect that users will
learn these flat names through a variety of external mechanisms that
the user trusts... Users won’t,
of course, remember the flat names directly, but will have their own
private namespace of human-readable names, which map onto these
global and flat names... While such flat names are harder
to use than today’s DNS names, they offer the advantage that the
mappings between private human-readable names and flat names
will be free to reflect evolving social structures rather than being
tied, as DNS names are, to a fixed administrative structure."

If the user is required to put more effort into managing oft-frequented sites, I believe there would be some more resistance to the use of this system, at least until something that sounds similar to DNS is implemented - a large, standard mapping of human-readable names to flat names. The problem there is that we're back to the very problem that DONA was trying to solve! I believe that as an architectural improvement, DONA could be quite valuable, but I fear that their apparent desire to replace DNS could not be realized because a less technically-sophisticated public would demand convenience. I am reminded of "Why Johnny Can't Encrypt," by Whitten and Tygar, where a user study found that PGP encryption was not widely adopted because of increased end-user complexity. Users, in the end, want networks to function with a minimum of input from their end, and I believe there would be a great deal of resistance to a change that increased the effort required of those users.

[As an aside: I really hate when people switch the misperceived-as-sexist-but-grammatically-gender-neutral "he" for the most-assuredly-sexist-but-in-the-nonstandard-way "she." Maybe I'll discuss that sometime later.]