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Re: [Ietf] New .mobi, .xxx, ... TLDs?

2004-04-29 17:22:34

So, place your bets on which slippery slopes ICANN takes us down...

ICANN loves these "sponsored" TLDs.  It's the only kind they are presently
considering.  Sponsors generally have the cash needed to cover ICANN's
application fee (which is typically on the order of $35,000 to $50,000,
and is non-refundable even if the application is turned down or left in an
indefinite limbo of being neither accepted nor rejected) and any ongoing
tithes.  (Remember, ICANN's budget is growing towards $10,000,000USD per
year and that money has to come from somewhere.)  And the "sponsors"
generally have well a behaved and limited membership and are thus less
likely to burden ICANN staff with work and are less likely to get into
disputes (and lawsuits) with ICANN.

I personally find many of the proposed uses for these "sponsored" TLDs
rather silly and non-innovative - and they could well be done further down
the DNS hierarchy and their only reason to be at the top level is for the
prestige (and image marketing value) of having top level domain status.

There are a couple of things about this situation:

First, is that some of the TLD proposals before ICANN, such as .mobi,
might contain some seeds of technical harm to the net.  For example, if
the .mobi folks don't use their own intermediate caching resolvers and
rather allow all those mobile devices to go directly to the roots then
there could be an increase in the traffic going to root and other servers.
This could be exacerbated if those devices are frequently power cycled and
lose their DNS caches.  The .mobi folks haven't said that they are going
to do this, but then again they haven't said that they are aware of this
potential issue.

Second, the idea that a TLD categorizes all of the resource records of all
types found under that TLD seems to me to be wrong.  For instance, assume
there's a TLD called "blue". if an A record found under a.b.c.blue leads
me to an IP address on an interface, it is unreasonable to believe that
the only services delivered via that address are of a "blue" nature.  I
suspect that many people who want these TLDs think of the net only in the
limited sense of the world wide web.

Third is that, as Tony Hain mentioned, there is trademark pressure that
will eventually suggest to every big trademark holder that they ought to
be a TLD.  This may or not come to pass, but we can guess that at least
some of the big trademark folks will give it a try, particularly after
some of ICANN's "sponsored" TLDs ossify over time into de facto marks and
thus blaze a trail that trademark owners might want to follow.  And where
one trademark owner goes, the herd is sure to follow.

My own view is that we ought to be trying to shape the DNS tree so that it
is well shaped in terms of width and depth of the hierarchy.  I don't know
the metrics of that shape.  Have there been studies regarding the how the
efficiency of DNS and DNS caching vary with DNS label depth and zone
width?

As for uses of TLDs - my own view is that as long as they are allocated
only rarely then the few awards should go to those uses that contain the
maximum innovation, maximimum flexibility, and give the greatest value to
the users of the net.

But I don't see why allocation of new TLDs needs to be a rare event.

Personally, I want a lot of new TLDs, so that folks who have silly ideas
and silly business models can try em out and be given a chance to flop -
but this means that there needs to be a criteria to determine flopness and
to reap the failed TLDs so they don't become dead zones in the DNS
hierarchy.

And I think it ought to be a requirement that any idea proposed for a TLD
first be prototyped somewhere down the DNS hierarchy.

Anybody who wants a new TLD should have to pledge allegance to the
end-to-end principle (i.e. no new "sitefinder"s) and promise to adhere to
applicable internet technical standards and practices.

I also would like to start to break the semantic implications of TLD names
- I'd prefer that any new ones have names that are meaningless in any
language, like "ts4-0k7m".  Yeah this has been gone over many times - but
I still have this hope that with some nudging people will stop using DNS
as a directory.

                --karl--


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