Roots (was Re: [ga] ICANN TO LOSE COUNTRY CODES?)

[Sandy Harris <sandy@storm.ca>]

Darrell Greenwood wrote:
> 
> ICANN TO LOSE COUNTRY CODES?
> Country code chiefs have formed a working group that is
> considering alternatives to letting ICANN manage their
> ccTLDs on its root server.

Methinks I'm missing something here.

I'd have thought it was obvious that the whole thing needs
to be heirarchical for performance and load-balancing
reasons. Ideally, a root server should have nothing on it
but pointers to roots for TLDs. Then have per-TLD root
servers.

( aside:
	Perhaps you need multiple TLD-root servers for an
	overused domain like .com. Short of stopping selling
	.com names and building some procedure to kill unused
	or redundant ones (not bad ideas technically, but I
	suspect they won't fly) there seems no alternative
	to that. Caching helps, but likely not enough.

	Perhaps also it is more efficient to combine roots
	and a half dozen small nations might decide to use
	one root, or to act as secondaries for each other,
	or whatever, to manage cost/performance/reliability
	tradeoffs.
)

I'd have assumed that any national gov't could ask anyone it
liked to run its ccTLD. Of course they'd have to pay for that.
If the nation chose to contract running their root out to NSI,
that's fine too. There'd be costs for that, but no obvious reason
any of that revenue should go to ICANN.

Any root server (NSI or alternate) has to point to whatever the
national gov't chooses to use. There might be a charge for this,
but at most a few $100, not the million the article mentions.

For that matter, I would think the same applies to .gov and
.mil. If the US gov't or the Pentagon want to run TLDroots for
those, or contract it to whoever, they can, and the NSI-run
root must point to them.

So I cannot see why these folks need a working group.

If, say, the folks responsible for .uk don't like how
that domain is being managed, then they build a root server
for it and tell (not ask) NSI to point to it. Since various
national bodies have authority for their own ccTLDs, NSI must
do that.

So for that part of the problem, I don't see what the working
group has to talk about. They can just do it.

Have I misunderstood something here?

> The move follows resentment
> from country code leaders that feel excluded from ICANN's
> decision-making on policies affecting the Internet.
> http://www.theregister.co.uk/content/6/14999.html

If, on the other hand, the issue is that they don't have
enough input to the ICANN process, then perhaps they, and
we, have something to talk about here.
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