Re: [wg-c] voting on TLDs

["Mark C. Langston" <skritch@home.com>]

On Sun, Mar 05, 2000 at 04:15:19PM -0800, Dave Crocker wrote:
> At 03:27 PM 3/5/2000 -0800, Karl Auerbach wrote:
> 
> >I have yet to see any technical or policy basis to have any belief
> >whatsoever that additional TLDs, even thousands of them, will have any
> >impact on the "stability of the Internet".
> 
> Karl,
> 
> You might not like the analyses or concerns that have been raised, but they 
> have been raised repeatedly.  You have seen them and you have responded to 
> them.
> 
> Administrative instability is just as bad -- actually much worse -- as 
> crashing machines.  We have no evidence that a flood of new, inexperienced 
> registry administrators will provide stable service.  Quite the opposite.

That's odd.  Until someone went and got Paul Vixie to state that
adding a large number of new TLDs would pose no technical problem, the
arguments here were about instability rooted in technical issues.
Now that that argument is untenable, it's shifted to the unprovable 
claim that adding new registries will break things.

You say that we have no evidence that a flood of new, inexperienced
registry admins will provide stable service.  Well, we have no
evidence to the contrary.  We do, however, have more than ample proof
that administrative instability has not damaged the Internet.  If you
need any examples, witness the bulk of current and past registrars.
Look at NSI.  The net routes around trouble; it doesn't come crashing
down around our ears just because somebody can't run their business
properly.

If you want to make an argument that the stability of the Internet
would suffer dearly in the face of administrative incompetence, then
you should acknowledge that the Internet has been dead for many years
now, and DNS was stillborn.  If you want to make that argument, then
ICANN is jumping up and down on its grave.


-- 
Mark C. Langston
mark@bitshift.org
Systems & Network Admin
San Jose, CA