RE: [wg-c] voting on TLDs

["Roeland M. J. Meyer" <rmeyer@mhsc.com>]

---- Roeland M.J. Meyer, Sunday, March 12, 2000 0900 hrs.
Gawd, I hate to agree with Dave on anything these days, but;

---- Dave Crocker, Monday, March 06, 2000 8:45 AM
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.

---- Roeland M.J. Meyer, Sunday, March 12, 2000 0900 hrs.
What Dave fails to mention here is that most of the triggers for those
discussions were Dave Crocker and Kent Crispin repeatedly raising the same
issues over and over again, just as they have done here, although number
three is recent, since ICANN, and a valid concern. The result is as Dave
says, items 1 and 2 are massively covered. Item 1, particulary has been
pounded to the point that the dead horse is only a memory. Item 2 is an
issue with a vetting process, and is not effected by item 1. Item 3 is a
policy jurisdictional issue which we have no power to effect (nor do the
folks in WG-B).

---- Dave Crocker, Monday, March 06, 2000 8:45 AM
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.

---- Roeland M.J. Meyer, Sunday, March 12, 2000 0900 hrs.
The only point Dave leaves off here, and rightly, from his perspective, is
the natural limit of the marketplace. The most optimistic view is that there
appears to be a maximum market size of 3000-4000 TLDs, depending on how they
are defined. This appears well within the technical limits of the current
DNS system, where the technical limits appear to be in the region of
"millions". This is indeed conservative.

---- Dave Crocker, Monday, March 06, 2000 8:45 AM
>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?

---- Roeland M.J. Meyer, Sunday, March 12, 2000 0900 hrs.
Actually, my records show outages of several days duration, going back to
1997. This goes back to when NSI had trouble telling the difference between
root servers and gtld root servers <g>. However, arguments of the
self-healing nature of the DNS is that the Internet, at large seems to be
able to ignore these outages more successfully, since then.

---
R O E L A N D  M .  J .  M E Y E R
CEO, Morgan Hill Software Company, Inc.
An eCommerce and eBusiness practice
providing products and services for the Internet.
Tel: (925)373-3954
Fax: (925)373-9781