duane wessels' presentation at the last eugene nanog meeting distinguished between two kinds of traffic received at f-root during his sampling work: crap: 97.9%; non-crap: 2.1%. the "crap" category includes requestors who do not seem to cache the responses they hear, thus rendering the actual TTL moot. therefore if there were a drop in TTL for root-zone data, it would only be a multiplier against 2.1% of f-root's present volume. but i agree with daniel. the reason verisign is doing this has got to be because ultradns does it, and .ORG therefore has marketing hoopla that .COM/.NET lacks, and parity was needed. the primary beneficiaries of this new functionality are spammers and other malfeasants, and the impact of having it in many TLD's will be to put downward pressure on TTL's. this all needs to be looked at very carefully. -- Paul Vixie