Steve Crocker on New TLDs

The crucial point, however, is that the issue discussed in the quotation of Dr. Crocker in the article, which was also the subject of your “actual experiment” (at least as I understand what you did), is a red herring (definition: “[from the practice of drawing a red herring across a trail to confuse hunting dogs]: something that distracts attention from the real issue”).

It’s really no surprise that the root servers can serve up DNS replies from a larger root zone file, even one with a million names. Discussion about that point is not even very interesting, IMHO. Instead, it’s a distraction from the real technical issues: are there issues with managing (in the broader sense) a larger root zone file; if so, can they be adequately addressed while maintaining an exactingly high accuracy rate; and, if so, are the economic and other costs of doing that worthwhile? My posting was not intended to answer these questions (the ensuing discussion would bring many factors into play). But it's just a distraction to focus on how many entries the root servers can serve.

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Re: Read On by George Matrox

Re: Read On
by KarlAuerbach on Saturday March 13 2004, @10:18PM (#13194)
User #3243 Info | http://www.cavebear.com/

Again I find your argument interesting but ultimately non persuasive.

We have actual existance proofs that it is possible to manage multi-million name zones, day in and day out, with reliability and with accuracy. The .com and .org TLDs are those proofs.

The red herring is the implication that the root zone is somehow different and that it will wobble and crash should it be expanded faster than the glacial pace established to date by ICANN.

We know for a fact that zones of millions of names can be, and are today, managed reliably.

But even if ICANN were to today start expanding the root by adding one TLD per hour - yes one per hour - we would not see a root zone of a million names until year 2118, more than a century from now. It is unreasonable to believe that ICANN a century from now will not be able to do then what Verisign and PIR do today.

The chicken-little attitude expressed by ICANN is without foundation. And if ICANN truely believed in its one fears then it would adopt a new TLD policy in which the chosen few TLDs would be those that had the greatest demonstrable value to the internet community. Instead, ICANN has adopted a policy of selecting TLDs that benefit only a few small business groups.

ICANN is going to have to base its restraint of who may participate in the DNS marketplace on something more than unarticulated fears that resemble paranoia more than reasoned thought.

ICANN's policies, because they are based on nothing more than obviously baseless conjuring have created pressures that could lead to the splitting of the internet. ICANN is afraid of an artificial boogyman and we, the community of internet users may pay dearly for the damage caused by that fear.

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Re: Read On
by Muhhk on Wednesday March 17 2004, @11:36PM (#13212)
User #3085 Info

It seem logical than the task of managing the root domain is no different in essense to the task of managing .com or .co.uk. If these large zones can work without error then so can the root surely?

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