[ga-roots] On why the root is not open

[Harald Tveit Alvestrand <harald@alvestrand.no>]

At 11:32 12.05.2001 -0700, Simon Higgs wrote:
>Second misconception. There is no shortage of TLDs. There's an 
>artificially manufactured scarcity. Big difference. Root fracture is a 
>natural consequence of artificial scarcity. The Internet routes around 
>failure. Take away the artificial scarcity, put all the TLDs requested 
>since 1995 into the USG root, and the problem goes away.

Since the participants on this list seem intent on rehashing ALL the old 
arguments no matter what others want, I might as well put up the standard 
response to this one.

TECHNICALLY, the DNS can easily support several hundred names in the root 
zone - because we are doing that now.
TECHNICALLY, we have grave doubts that it can support a million names in 
the root zone with an adequate stability for the root zone service. (The 
problem is rate of change for stability)

So, we the TECHNICAL people have passed a slip to the POLITICAL/OPERATIVE 
community saying "more than a hundred but less than a million, please".

As .com has proved, an open zone will have more than a million entries.
So there has to be a rule; some will get it, some will not.

The POLITICAL community, knowing full well that deleting a TLD from the 
root is probably going to be impossible, went through the WG-B process, and 
came up with the "five to ten" recommendation.

In the same process, there was no consensus for giving "those who thought 
of it first" any preferential treatment in handing out new TLDs. That was 
2000, not 1997.

Bottom line:

Some rule for who gets into the root must exist. And FCFS was not accepted.

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