If the Internet is the ultimate postal service, the Domain Name System (DNS) is its frantic sorting office, expediting delivery of billions of messages each day by deftly matching host names to IP addresses. Twenty years after the Net’s inception, the DNS is now handling a staggering 100 million individual domains -- a figure that will soon be just the tip of the iceberg, according to DNS inventor Paul Mockapetris.

Mockapetris is in town to talk to this year’s Forum delegates about the future of Internet development, a subject he’s imminently qualified to forecast as designer of the original database system that still serves as the platform for all Internet traffic.
According to Mockapetris, the DNS is poised for a new wave of explosive growth as emerging technologies like electronic signature encryption, Internet telephony and RFID tags become pervasive elements of a futuristic world in which trillions of electronic identifiers are constantly exchanged between a huge range of fixed and wireless applications.

When Mockapetris developed the first DNS design back in 1983 as a young engineer at the University of Southern California, he built in scalability to an “unimaginable” 50 million separate identifiers. Happily, the elegance of his original design, combined with order of magnitude increases in computing power, has allowed the system -- with a few minor tweaks -- to handle the more than one billion identifiers currently in use.
Now, as chief scientist and chairman of software developer Nomimum, he’s working on developing super servers to handle massive increases in DNS and DHCP (Dynamic Host Configuration Protocol) traffic he says will be generated by new applications ranging from Wi-Fi and 3G to electronic RFID inventory. “We’re witnessing the behind-the-scenes emergence of a totally new industry based on a vast global network of identifiers,” says Mockapetris.

Already, says Mockapetris, 60 million American cows have tiny RFID identification tags implanted in their ears that link to information about their identities and histories. Retail giant WalMart will shortly introduce the technology into its own stock control system, to be followed by a tidal wave of other merchants as tag prices fall to around one US cent. At the same time, next-generation mobile systems will increasingly use the DNS to exchange the information that will allow users to seamlessly log on anywhere, anytime.

Mockapetris has coined his own new “Mockapetris Law” that foresees the doubling of electronic identifiers every 12 months. “We’ll see more DNS growth in the next five years than in the last 20 put together,” he predicts.