Well, we don't have human-meaningful names even now, at least not for most humans - for us technology types, sure, but if the names were truly human-meaningful, we'd have far less ...ibm.com.cn style of phishing, e.g.<p>A few commenters make the point about phone numbers and IP addresses being somewhere between analogous and homologous. I think that's true for IPv4, but definitely not for IPv6.<p>But that misses an unexpected benefit of the DNS: Traffic management based on geolocation. Even without human-meaningful names, nickname to address translation would have benefit for that reason alone.<p>As others have pointed out, we don't so much need a name service, we want a reputation service.<p>After all, most people get to web sites, e.g., via a bookmark or embedded URL or a search result.<p>If we got rid of the DNS and had to enter IP(v4, not v6) addresses by hand, a lot of us would still get there via bookmarks or embedded URLs or search results. Little/nothing would change.<p>I'm not suggesting redesigning the Internet with a dedicated search engine layer in our not-7-layer stack, but I do think the differences between current use and design intent are significant enough, even if sometimes subtle and unforeseen, that a rethink could take us to interesting places.<p>(My favourite part of the article are the counter-examples. So the triangle is itself wrong, generally, and only correct, more or less, for specific technical approaches.)