Re: [wg-c] voting on TLDs

[Dave Crocker <dcrocker@brandenburg.com>]

Always interesting to see such selective memories:

At 05:29 AM 3/6/2000 -0800, William X. Walsh wrote:
>On 06-Mar-2000 Dave Crocker wrote:
> > At 09:39 PM 3/5/2000 -0800, Mark C. Langston wrote:
> >>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
>
>No, it's not.  But a nice way to try and dismiss it without refuting 
>it.  He is
>spot on, Dave.

The concern for stability has been present from the start of discussions 
about gTLD expansion, roughly five years ago.  It has covered:

         1.  Technical and operational impact on the root

         2.  Administrative and operational capabilities of registries

         3.  Disruption due to legal distraction from the trademark community.

A significant problem coming from any one of these 3 different directions 
will render the DNS unstable.  The record of listing and discussing these 3 
categories of concern is massive and public.

The portion of Paul Vixie's opinion about the first concern, technical 
issues, attends to an entirely reasonable basis for believing that the 
purely technical limit to the right is quite high.  Other senior technical 
commentators focus quite heavily on conservative operations practise when 
scaling a service.  They conclude that one, or a few, hundred names is a 
reasonable near-term limit.


> > Indeed, please DO look at NSI.  Their history ain't nearly as wonderful as
> > you seem to believe.
>
>I think that is exactly what he meant, the net has not 
>destabilized.  There are

Except for ignoring NSI's very long learning curve, which included messing 
up individual registrations randomly and seriously, corrupting the whois 
data base, and corrupting the root, I suppose you are right...


>currently over 240 registries operating, and with various types of management
>models and with a lot of variance in their operating structure.  There have
>been problems that have resulted in entire TLDs not being able to be resolved
>for several hours.  But the net has not destabilized.  Indeed, they were minor

Service outages of "several hours" for end-users does not constitute an 
instability?

What a curious view of the term.

d/

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Dave Crocker  <dcrocker@brandenburg.com>
Brandenburg Consulting  <www.brandenburg.com>
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