In article <95F7DF59-052D-43BA-869F-289DF915C62E@arbor.net> you write:
On Mar 10, 2012, at 7:02 PM, Robert E. Seastrom wrote:
there are four gtlds Aren't there actually seven? Including the new IDN TLDs, there are now 60.
well .... there are the legacy (pre-2000) set. there are the seven arising from the 7-10 proposal from WG-C*, aka the "2000 round**", of which three are "sponsored" (restrictions on registration policies) and four were "generic" (no such restrictions, price caps), all of which operate in some form or another at present. there are the set arising from the 2004 round***, all of which nominally are "sponsored", which now includes .xxx, but does not yet include .post (501(c)(3) (choice-of-contracting-or-memoing with a treaty organization problem), so about two dozen. there are the IDN (ascii encoded representations of unicode) delegations arising from the IDN ccTLD Fast-Track program, which share the no-or-significiantly-different-contract property of the delegations made for most iso3166 code points. to refer to these as "generic" is both reasonable, and misleading. the underlying issue is whether the operator has repurposed the original ASCII, or subsequent IDN delegations, as more similar to the CNOBI**** set of registries on a registration policy basis, making the delegation "generic", but without a CNOBI-like contract with ICANN, or not. examples of repurposed ccTLDs are nu, cc, me, us, ... the location of registries is quite distinct from the location of name server constellations, with the former being mono- or dual-sited, and operated by the delegee or single (there are exceptions) contractor, and the latter being multi-sited, and operated by multiple parties. a related issue, the subject of v6 evangelism, is the availability of redundant transit, which under the current ICANN DAG, appears to me to preclude registry siting in venues lacking redundant native v6 transit in Q12013, limiting data centers in Africa and South Asia. cheers, -e * member, WG-C. ** contributor to one or more successful 2000 registry inits. *** contributor to one or more successful 2004 registry inits. **** CNOBI == COM/NET/ORG/BIZ/INFO -- a single business model.