On URL redirectors

Back in the day, the address resolution layer of the Internet was DNS. DNS was an open, unified, distributed, redundant, highly-engineered address resolution mechanism which hid opaque identifiers like 209.131.36.158 under the hood of nice human-readable names like www.yahoo.com. Now we have a fragmented pile of proprietary, centralized, hacked-together address resolution mechanisms which replace a nice URL like freedom-to-tinker.com/blog/felten/modest-proposal-three-strikes-print with the opaque string bit.ly/4p3vL. Progress!