On Jul 1, 2008, at 1:43 AM, James Hess wrote:
I'm still having a hard time seeing what everyone is getting worked up about.
Maybe it's not that bad. The eventual result is instead of having a billion .COM SLDs, there are a billion TLDs: all eggs in one basket,
There is the question of the fee structure. If the fee is really > $ 100,000 USD, then this will damp down the numbers considerably. Here is a way to estimate this - by my estimate, there are something like 1 million worldwide companies with revenues > $ 5 million USD / yr. The companies I have dealt with making ~ $ 5 million / year are hesitant to spend $ 100 K on _anything_, but maybe TLDs will be seen as the thing to have. So, I could imagine 1 million TLDs at this price level, maybe, but not many more, and maybe substantially less. How many .com domains are there ? I have a _2001_ report of 19 million. I would guess maybe 50 million by now. Would adding 1 million TLDs really be worse for the DNS system than 50 or 100 million dot com domains ? Of course, this depends on the crucial question of the fee. If it drops to $ 100 USD, then I could certainly imagine a similar number to the number of dot com domains, i.e., many millions. This seems like a good place to ask if any of that ICANN money is going to the root domains...
the root zone -- there will be so many gTLD servers, no DNS resolver can cache the gTLD server lookups, so almost every DNS query will now involve an additional request to the root, instead of (usually) a request to a TLD server (where in the past the TLD servers' IP would still be cached for most lookups).
Ultimately that is a 1/3 increase in number of DNS requests, say to lookup www.example.com if there wasn't a cache hit. In that case, I would expect the increase in traffic seen by root servers to be massive.
Possible technical ramifications that haven't been considered with the proper weight, and ICANN rushing ahead towards implementation in 2009 without having provided opportunity for internet & ops community input before developing such drastic plans?
Massive further sell-out of the root zone (a public resource) for profit? Further commercialization of the DNS? Potentially giving some registrants advantageous treatment at the TLD level, which has usually been available to registrants on more equal terms?? [access to TLDs merely first-come, first-served]
Vanity TLD space may make ".COM" seem boring. Visitors will expect names like "MYSITE.SHOES", and consider other sites like myshoestore1234.com "not-legitimate" or "not secure"
I personally doubt it, for the same reason that there is shoes.com but not nike.shoes.com. To me, the notion that people will find the shoes they want on the web by starting at http://www.shoes seems archaic, very 1995. What there may be is a raft of trademark lawsuits - for example, Shoes.com, Inc. a subsidiary of Brown Shoe Company (NYSE:BWS) presumably has some sort of trademark rights to "shoes.com". Nobody has rights to "shoes," so expect some fights here (as a potential example, between the future owners of "shoes" and companies like Nike, and maybe also shoes.com. IANAL, but I suspect that Brown Show might be able to claim that ".Shoes" might infringe on the "shoes.com" mark). Regards Marshall
The lucky organization who won the ICANN auction and got to run the SHOES TLD may price subdomains at $10000 minimum for a 1-year registration (annual auction-based renewal/registration in case of requests to register X.TLD by multiple entities) and registrants under vanity TLD to sign non-compete agreements and other pernicious EULAs and contracts of adhesion merely to be able to put up their web site,
As a subdomain of what _LOOKS_ like a generic name.
And, of course, http://shoes/ reserved for the TLD registrant's billion-$ shoe store, with DNS registration a side-business (outsourced to some DNS registrar using some "domain SLD resale" service).
The possibilities that vanity TLD registry opens are more insidious than it was for someone to bag a good second-level domain.
Sure, nefarious use of say .local could cause a few problems but this is
I'd be more concerned about nefarious use of a TLD like ".DLL", ".EXE", ".TXT" Or other domains that look like filenames.
Seeing as a certain popular operating system confounds local file access via Explorer with internet access...
You may think "abcd.png" is an image on your computer... but if you type that into your address, er, location bar, it may be a website too!
".local" seems like a pretty good TLD name to be registered, compared to others, even many that have been established or proposed in the past, more general than ".city" (unincorporated areas with some sort of name also can use .local)
short, general and simple (just like a gTLD should be),
not highly-specific and elaborate like ".museum"
-- -J