On Mon, 22 Apr 1996, Sean Doran wrote:

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Looking around a bit, completely unscientifically and without more than eyeballing things, it appears that this practice is continuing, despite the back-pressure of a registration fee levied by the InterNIC.

Sean, you misunderstand. The fee is not a back-pressure, on the contrary, it is an IMPETUS. It's like this...

Company: I want one of thos domain thingies.

Internic: That'll be 50 bucks.

Company: 50 bucks? I'll take 5 then; put it on my VISA.

This also, has the effect, before the fee, the Internic could say one to a company, with now with the fee the are on shaky ground, when combined with their trademark policy. (if you own the trademark, and pay the fee, the probably can't prevent you from registering as many a you want.) It does ohav ethe positive effet of putting the cost of domain speculation, into the non-trivial range.

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issue on any front, and whether it really needs fixing by perhaps us suggesting that subsequent domains be charged on an exponential scale, with proceeds going into the costs of maintaining the worldwide DNS, particularly with respect to user-and-administrator education.

Someone posted some stats on com-priv a week ago that would indicate that Internic is raking in $10 million per annum with the current fees. Are you sure anything needs fixing here?

Hm... Internic is raking in "millions" with registration fees, but the root name server operators are getting ZERO. Yet, the real service that you are registering for, is root name service, not the WHOISS database, (root name service is even debateable, since most of the domains are in .com, but the same machines serve .com as ., so its moot.) If I were a root name server opeartor, that could cause major havok, if I decided too, I would be asking Network Solutions, aka internic.NET., where my cut is. If all the root name servers, decided for just 1% of that fee, or the'd drop "internic.net" out of the root zone files, they could probably get away with it. It would also solve the whole issue of resrouces to support root DNS.

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(NANOG or I*-something-or-other); I'm just wondering if I'm completely out-to-lunch on this one.

You have a good idea there in establishing a funding link between the registrants of domain names and the people who operate the registries and the root nameservers. Of course, most registries are already funded by domain fees like the Internic's $50. The missing link is funding for the root nameservers. Some people also feel that DNS registrations should fund ISOC/IAB/IETF/IANA or some sub or superset thereof.

ftp://ietf.cnri.reston.va.us/internet-drafts/draft-ymbk-itld-admin-00.txt covers some of this as does the POISED95 WG

There is a very dangers path, because once anyone can buy a top level domain form the root name server opeartors, people will, how long before "@aol.", and "@home." show up? About 2 seconds. You would also need some sort of feedback into the referal rate, but with good postive and negative caching that wouldn't be a huge hurdel.

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all clearly able to fit (at least for the moment) into <eighty-subdomains>.BigCompany.COM.

I think human beings like flat hierearchies. In management. In GUI menu systems. And now in DNS. Certainly they seem to be more efficient in management and in GUI menu systems and even B+ Trees vs. binary trees. Maybe they really are more efficient in the DNS as well.

Flat space will fail when 50% of the humans on this planet have their own domain. (You think Internet growth is bad now, just wait until a Internet terminal can be had for $100, the $500 ones are only a year or so around the corner, and based on historical trends, the rgowth rate increases every time the the price point drops. (Which could happen, 2.5 billion people on the Net in 6 years...) (Assuming population iof the Net is doubling every 9 months, like bandwidth, and addressable hosts, and domains).

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If people think this sort of thing is OK, I'll shut up now.

I don't think there really is anything that we can do about it other than to accomodate it. I fully intend to have a couple of dozen domains just for myself and run virtual WWW servers on my home LAN in the next century. But by then that will be the normal state of affairs.

Luckyly, all the good names will be taken well before this happens, and there just isn;t that much motiviation, for people to get 6 different domains and pay for them when they look like fsdhwue47.sdfj, etc. We are quite limited by the fact that the DNS protocols seem to limit us to [A-Z][a-z][1-0]-_. We would be really bad off if the DNS implementers had used UNICODE.

The plans to open up the top level domain space by adding 15 or more new international top level domains per year will make the landscape rather more interesting. http://www.kirk.tlhIngan.alt :-)

Who has proposed this? I don't see it happening. A. it won't scale B. it looks ugly Thus violating the two key reasons the DNS system is so popular today. I think more TLD will be opened, but it will be for a couple of reasons, first off some re-writes DNS so that the clunky concept of a "root" name server is dead, then the commerical giants buy Microtsoft, or your favorite software vendor to implement the new protocol, and with their millions of users for everyone elses network to work they would need to upgrade to the new software to support "aol.". The social reasons with regard to Paul Vixie's "dot envy", are quite clear. I expect there to be a good bit of money made in the "domain length shortening business". I can see that ad now: Domains R Us, get your domain shortened here. Be the envy of major corporations and national governments, meet exiciting women and make money in your new home based business, with Domains R Us. sigh. -- Jeremy Porter, Freeside Communications, Inc. jerry@fc.net PO BOX 80315 Austin, Tx 78708 | 1-800-968-8750 | 512-339-6094 http://www.fc.net -- Mike Byrnes mbyrnes@tpoint.net Turning Point Information Services, Inc. Austin, Tx Corporate Online Solutions Since 1991 -----------------------------------------------------------------