Re: DNS and potential energy

* Marshall Eubanks · * Tue Jul 01 09:32:07 2008

On Jul 1, 2008, at 1:43 AM, James Hess wrote:
I'm still having a hard time seeing what everyone is getting worked
up about.

Maybe it's not that bad.   The eventual result is instead of having a
billion .COM SLDs, there are a billion TLDs:  all eggs in one basket,

There is the question of the fee structure. If the fee is really > $
100,000 USD, then

this will damp down the numbers considerably.
Here is a way to estimate this - by my estimate, there are something
like 1 million worldwide companies with

revenues > $ 5 million USD / yr. The companies I have dealt with
making ~ $ 5 million / year are hesitant to spend $ 100 K on
_anything_, but maybe TLDs will be seen as the thing to have. So, I
could imagine 1 million TLDs at this price level, maybe, but not many
more, and maybe substantially less.
How many .com domains are there ? I have a _2001_ report of 19
million. I would guess maybe 50 million by now.
Would adding 1 million TLDs really be worse for the DNS system than 50
or 100 million dot com domains ?
Of course, this depends on the crucial question of the fee. If it
drops to $ 100 USD, then I could certainly imagine a similar number to
the number of dot com domains, i.e., many millions.
This seems like a good place to ask if any of that ICANN money is
going to the root domains...

the root zone -- there will be so many gTLD servers, no DNS resolver
can cache the gTLD server lookups,  so almost every DNS query will now
involve an additional request to the root,  instead of (usually) a
request to a TLD server  (where in the past the TLD servers' IP would
still be cached for most lookups).
Ultimately that is a  1/3   increase in number of DNS requests, say to
lookup www.example.com
if there wasn't a cache hit.   In that case, I would expect the
increase in traffic seen by root servers to be massive.

Possible technical ramifications that haven't been considered with

the proper weight,

and ICANN rushing ahead towards implementation in 2009 without
having provided

opportunity for internet & ops community input before developing such

drastic plans?

Massive further sell-out of the  root zone (a public resource) for
profit?  Further
commercialization of the DNS?  Potentially giving  some registrants
advantageous treatment at the TLD level,  which has usually been
available to registrants on  more equal terms??
[access to TLDs merely first-come, first-served]
Vanity  TLD space may make  ".COM" seem boring. Visitors will expect
names like
"MYSITE.SHOES", and consider other sites like  myshoestore1234.com
"not-legitimate"
or "not secure"

I personally doubt it, for the same reason that there is shoes.com but
not

nike.shoes.com.
To me, the notion that people will find the shoes they want on the web
by starting at http://www.shoes seems

archaic, very 1995.
What there may be is a raft of trademark lawsuits - for example,
Shoes.com, Inc. a subsidiary of Brown Shoe Company (NYSE:BWS)
presumably has some sort of trademark rights to "shoes.com". Nobody
has rights

to "shoes," so expect some fights here (as a potential example,
between the future owners of "shoes" and companies like Nike, and
maybe also shoes.com. IANAL, but I suspect that Brown Show might be
able to claim that ".Shoes" might infringe on the "shoes.com" mark).

Regards
Marshall

The lucky organization who won the ICANN auction and got to run the
SHOES TLD may price subdomains at $10000 minimum for a 1-year
registration (annual auction-based renewal/registration in case of
requests to register X.TLD by multiple entities) and registrants under
vanity TLD  to sign  non-compete agreements  and  other pernicious
EULAs and contracts of adhesion merely to be able to put up their web
site,
As a subdomain of what _LOOKS_ like a generic name.

And, of course,  http://shoes/   reserved for the TLD registrant's
billion-$ shoe store,
with DNS registration a side-business (outsourced to some DNS
registrar using some "domain SLD resale" service).

The possibilities that vanity TLD registry opens are more  insidious
than it  was for someone to bag a good second-level domain.

Sure, nefarious use of say .local could cause a few problems but
this is

I'd be more concerned about nefarious use of a TLD like ".DLL",
".EXE", ".TXT"

Or other domains that look like filenames.
Seeing as a certain popular operating system confounds local file
access via

Explorer with internet access...
You may think "abcd.png"  is an image on your computer... but if you
type that into your
address, er, location bar,  it may be a website too!

".local" seems like a pretty good TLD name to be registered,

compared to others,

even many that have been established or proposed in the past, more
general

than ".city" (unincorporated areas with some sort of name also can
use .local)
short, general and simple (just like a gTLD should be),

not highly-specific and elaborate like ".museum"

--
-J