Locality Signals

[lauren]

Another aspect we should be thinking about is how IDONS can help solve a major problem with the existing DNS, which is the lack of reliable upstream signals to help Internet services send data to users from physically/logically nearby facilities whenever possible.

Under the current system, if a user is using a non-local DNS provider like OpenDNS (that's just one example), there is no reliable mechanism for the ultimately contacted site to determine where the user actually is, often resulting in the sending of data long distances through many extra hops unnecessarily.

While there are privacy issues to be considered of course (there will be situations where some users will not want given sites to determine even their broadly approximate locations -- I suspect explicit options may be needed to deal with this aspect), most users may get better performance for routine applications if they can be served over optimum paths based on their geographic locations through the mapping of those locations to the network topology.

--Lauren--