Encourage Enhancements to DNS

DRAFT - for discussion purposes only

• I'm wondering if ICANN can have the root servers provide some statistical information to the public through DNS requests that would allow any third party to determine certain non-private information about domains through a DNS request. Information like the age of the domain, the number of times the name servers have changed in the last 3 days, etc.
  • Commentary -- you may want to build views from the zone files, which you can obtain by contract with each registry, e.g., Verisign.
• There is an open source utility called rbldnsd which is extremely good and very easy to implement. It is a DNS server like Bind but it is optimized towards providing information and is far faster and memory efficient than Bind. The rbldnsd program is used extensively in the spam filtering world for IP based black lists as well as name based lists (FQDN Fully Qualified Domain Name as in example.com). The software uses extremely simple text file for configuration. These text file can be generated in many cases with simple shell scripts. These raw zone files can also be made available for downloading so as to reduce DNS lookup traffic. And it may end up structured in a way where each registrar provides the DNS just like Whois for the data under their control.
• In a DNS lookup there is usually a recursive resolver, often provided by the ISP or the enterprise. Suppose we add some functionality to the recursive resolver. Let's ask it to keep track of the recent history of changes to names it has cached. If there are too many changes within a certain period of time, the recursive resolver stops resolving that name for a period of time. This is similar to the idea I proposed before, except the stats and action are kept at the recursive resolver.