When you're rebuilding, do you change the foundation?

Looking at the advancements of 2025, you can begin to see into the 2030's. LLMs enhance our everyday thought process, autonomous robotics move us and our belongings through the world. Humans are integrating themselves to the utility of the internet at a deeply instinctual level.

It's not often that startups ask what it's all built on.

Underneath every popular internet application is a foundational networking technology, the Domain Name System. Colloquially known by its abbreviation "DNS". It may be the single most recognizable and important piece of internet infrastructure; after all, the ".com" boom was named after it.

The criticality of DNS also means it hasn’t changed much since its introduction in the 1980s.

When described, it’s often analogized as the “phone book of the internet”, but even that comparison now seems dated. It’s probably more akin to the “Google Maps of the internet”, before Google Maps had live traffic, POIs, search, rerouting, or anything that makes it the useful tool it is today.

This simplicity of DNS allows it to function with incredible resiliency. Though simplicity often means any necessary complexity is pushed down the chain. In this case, to the modern world of real-time applications.

Real-Time Resilience

At ANDYL, internet routing is where we put our first pin in the corkboard: we aim to build a DNS to fit the world of the 2030s, not the 1980s.

AI applications are a large driver of the recent 25% YoY global internet traffic growth, demanding constant uptime.

Devices that aren’t even attended by a human require network connectivity just to function safely.

During our past work with Uber ATG, we planned for how DNS misconfigurations could stall a self-driving car on the side of the road. Since DNS lacks modern software safeguards (in dev-ops parlance, "incremental rollouts" and "client-side failsafes"), we found that a core part of the internet's infrastructure just couldn't meet the requirements of this entire new modality.

Internet infrastructure needs its "Waze" moment. Every client should have its own independent network guidance system designed for their best experience. Network disruptions should be autonomously healed by intelligent clients, not centralized failovers. Routing changes complete in seconds, not minutes.

Semantic Discovery

Let’s take it further: what else has DNS been missing? DNS is a feat of computer architecture that navigates every user to every website on the internet. Yet Google became a trillion-dollar company by providing users the ability to... navigate the internet. They built a global index that should have been, at some capacity, foundational to public internet infrastructure in the first place.

Now every new AI search startup is charging head-first into the same problem, that even with knowledge retrieval capabilities that rival human intelligence, the quality and availability of the source data still holds vast weight in result quality.

Truly competitive web & AI search needs a DNS that stores & aggregates site metadata, with real-time updates following source content.

Verifiable History

Which brings us to my favorite word: integrity. Today, the internet asserts integrity of ownership using two core systems: domain names and encryption certificates. What we don’t yet have is forward looking integrity of content. Something that says, “I generated this content today, and 5 years from now everyone will still know it as I do today”. Because in a world where everything can be generated to project authenticity, how can one trust that content creation genuinely happened then and not just now?

Taken further, how can we guarantee that something actually, truly happened when AI can fabricate an entire century of "history" in seconds?

Our team is convinced that human history needs a DNS to permanently stamp content authenticity in time, accessible as a public resource.

Towards a Modern DNS

ANDYL is building a modern internet routing service, while using the maturity of DNS to bootstrap every request. We’re not reinventing the wheel—we’re adding a motor.

We're working with companies who have become integral parts of their users' day-to-day lives. Products that are used on the move, in real-time, with real consequences for downtime. Our experience at Uber & Meta provide inside depth to the most difficult challenges of scaling internet applications.

We don’t have a public API or a browsable demo (yet). We’re in the midst of building, and if you’re interested in building with us, drop in.

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