Menlo Park (ip-192.com): Google and a group of DNS providers recommended extending the DNS protocol. DNS is the system that translates an easy-to-remember name like www.ip-192.com to a numeric address. These are the IP addresses that computers use to communicate with one another on the Internet.
By returning different addresses to requests coming from different places, DNS can be used to load balance traffic and send users to a nearby server. For example, if you look up www.ip-192.com from a computer in Atlanta, it may resolve to an IP address pointing to a server in Atlanta. If you look up www.ip-192.com from Germany, the result could be an IP address pointing to a server in Germany. Sending the request to a nearby server improves speed, latency, and network utilization, said Google.
Currently, to determine the location where the request originates, authoritative nameservers look at the source IP address of the incoming request, which is the IP address of the DNS resolver, rather than the IP address of the computer where the request originates. Since the DNS resolver is often managed by an ISP or alternately is a third-party resolver like Google Public DNS. In most cases the resolver is close to its users, in which case the authoritative nameservers will be able to find the nearest server. However, some DNS resolvers serve many users over a wider area. In these cases, the lookup for www.ip-192.com may return the IP address of a server several countries away. If the authoritative nameserver could detect where the request comes from, a closer server might have been available.
The proposed DNS protocol extension lets recursive DNS resolvers include part of the IP address in the request sent to authoritative nameservers. Google proposes that only the first three octets, or top 24 bits, are sent. This will provide enough information to the authoritative nameserver to determine the network location, without triggering privacy issues, Google claims.
Over the next few months the group hopes to see this proposal accepted as an official Internet standard.
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