The layered architecture of Internet applications is articulated
through a slew of name/address boundaries. An opaque locator at one
level becomes a structured locator for the one below. A popular web
browser, for example, allows URLs to be typed into an "Address"
field; but in turn that URL is decomposed and resolved against
several more namespaces, such as scheme, host name, and path. This
proceeds recursively down to Ethernet hardware IDs and port numbers;
and all the way up to identifying human beings and vocabularies.
Inspired by the classic Eames film, "Powers of Ten", this talk begins
at an airline reservation page and zooms in and out to introduce a
host of Internet-scale namespaces embedded within an everyday
application. Furthermore, we will describe several distributed
resolution strategies, from Domain Name System to Address Resolution
Protocol. Finally, we attempt to identify the cross-cutting issues to
go beyond merely mechanical scaling to large numbers of names, to
reach Internet-scale: architectures that work across organizations,
across space, and across time.