Google Wants Policy and Technology Changes for Faster DNS

Posted 01/28/2010 at 5:20pm | by Jason Barry

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Google and Neustar UltraDNS have teamed up in an effort to make global DNS resolution a much speedier and accurate process than it is today.

DNS resolution, the process of looking up a common name, such as maximumpc.com, to find an IP address of a server associated with that name, does not take into account the geo-location of the computer making the request. Without this information, a DNS server may deliver the address to a server across the country (or the globe) resulting in a much slower internet experience.

However, Google and Neustar UltraDNS made a proposition called “Client IP Information in DNS requests.” Obviously from its name, the client IP making the DNS request sends along the first three quarters of their IP address to the DNS server, along with the query. With the first parts of the IP, the DNS server can geographically guess which servers to send back more accurately.

The evaluation of the proposal is underway, and undoubtedly will take a bit of time. Also expect the privacy advocates to pipe up to make sure client information isn’t compromised by this new process.