What's in a name [Internet Domain Name System]

Paul Mockapetris is the inventor of the Internet's Domain Name System. This article discusses why domain names are booming on the Net. As originally envisaged, the DNS was restricted to matching domain names and IP addresses, but Mockapetris decided to "overstep" his mandate and design a system that could be extended to include additional data types. As the DNS has grown in scale, its attractions as a distributed database have become increasingly powerful. There are currently some two million DNS servers on the public Internet, and around five times that number behind corporate firewalls contributing to the DNS's caching activity.