Maybe instead of:
<whatever>.COM being considered as three tokens and being looked up as: ask a ROOT nameserver for COM NSes ask a COM nameserver for <whatever> NSes ask a <whatever> nameserver for appropriate info (all modulo caching) instead we treat it as (leaving out the '<' '>' stuff out of laziness):
<w><h><a><t><e><v><e><r><.><c><o><m> and look up like this: ask a ROOT nameserver for M NSes ask a M nameserver for O NSes ... ask a <w> nameserver for appropriate info that will scale to a huge number of generally unformatted labels for things.
And, unfortunately, scale to taking huge numbers of seconds for stuff that isn't already cached. I just queried a bunch of sites and got times from .1s to 8s for 3-lookup queries. While I'm willing to wait for 10 seconds for a return, I'm not sure I'd be willing to wait 1.5 minutes. People have this perception that the net should go fast (unfortunately even when they're dialed up with 2400bd modems :-). This'll be a win for a.com, but a real lose for CompuServe.com :-). ...arun --------------------------------------------------------------------------- Arun Welch 5000 Arlington Centre Blvd Lead Software Engineer Columbus, OH 43220 CompuServe awelch@csi.compuserve.com