The Phone Book That Runs the Internet: A History of DNS
A series on how DNS evolved, one era at a time.
Part 1 · 1965–1983
Before There Was a Phone Book (1965-1983)
Part 2 · 1983–1987
The Invention (1983-1987)
Part 3 · 1985–1993 · Coming soon
The First Domains
The first .com goes to a Lisp machine company nobody remembers, and registration turns from a free paper form into a business.
Part 4 · 1996–1999 · Coming soon
ICANN Takes the Wheel
Jon Postel's death forces a handoff, ICANN forms, and the registry/registrar split creates the domain industry MSPs still navigate today.
Part 4B · 1994–Present · Coming soon
The Private Side of DNS
WINS, Active Directory, and the split-horizon setups that quietly rot when nobody explicitly owns internal DNS.
Part 5 · 1999–2005 · Coming soon
The Land Grab
New registrars, new TLDs, and the SiteFinder fiasco that turned DNS neutrality into a legal fight.
Part 6 · 2002–2010 · Coming soon
DNS Gets Attacked
A root server DDoS, the Kaminsky cache-poisoning bug, and the decade-long road to DNSSEC.
Part 6B · 2013–2019 · Coming soon
The Registrar Hijacking Wave
Attackers stop attacking the protocol and start phishing the registrar instead — from the Syrian Electronic Army to a federal emergency directive.
Part 7 · 1998–2015 · Coming soon
The Managed DNS and CDN Boom
Akamai and Cloudflare turn DNS into a performance product, and the market quietly consolidates around a handful of providers.
Part 8 · 2012–2016 · Coming soon
Governance Goes Global
The US lets go of DNS oversight for good — the same month a Mirai botnet DDoS proves what happens when everyone depends on the same provider.
Part 9 · 2016–Present · Coming soon
The Encryption Era
DNS ran in plain text for over thirty years. DoH and DoT finally encrypt it, and spark a fight with ISPs along the way.
Part 10 · Closing Piece · Coming soon
The Fragmentation Nobody Solved
The protocol got a forty-year head start on being excellent. DNS management never did, and that gap is where this series lands.