At 08:04 AM 5/18/01 -0700, Tim Langdell, PhD wrote:
There has been much talk of the introduction of new TLDs -- either new ICANN/DoC ones or those of the likes of New.Net -- affecting the "stability" of the Internet. And yet so far on all the lists, not just this one, I have not seen a single example of how the "stability" would or could be affected by such introductions. Can anyone give me even one example?
i don't see where there's a problem if there is a single root, but in the cases where there are "add on" roots which a limited portion of the internet can see, or even worse, competing roots which are advertising competing versions of the same TLDs, the loss of symmetry has some significant implications for support and operations. for example, it will be possible to send mail to folks who cannot easily reply because they cannot resolve your domain name, or vice versa. this could dramatically affect support costs, especially at dial ISPs with lots of naive users who when, confronted with this problem, will call the support lines. likewise, when support staffs are confronted with problems that involve folks whose DNS they cannot see, or when they are seeing problems with one version of my.net.fred and their DNS is showing them a different resolution of my.net.fred, it's going to get messy and expensive. lower level staff will not be competent to handle these issues in many NOCs, leading to more escalations to higher tiers. clearance rates in call centers will decline. how bad this is will depend entirely on to what extent alternative TLDs penetrate in these scenarios. obviously this potential exists today, but hasn't had a significant effect that i'm aware of, becaue the penetration of the alternative TLDs is insignificant. if new.net or one of the others were to take off to any significant degree, this would likely change. i decline to guess what the increased support costs might amount to. will it be the end of the world? no. but will costs (and thus rates) go up? yes. richard -- Richard Welty Averill Park Networking rwelty@averillpark.net