In article <20000920224220.E2038@gblx.net>, Austin Schutz <tex@off.org> wrote:

Do you have statistics to back up the 'three most widely-used TLDs' statement?

According to www.netsizer.com, org isn't even in the top ten. I'm not sure upon what they base their data, but I was unable to find evidence to the contrary.

They seem to be measuring number of hosts named under the zone, as measured by a recursive query. I think the best way to tell which TLD servers are most widely used would be to monitor the query traffic to the root nameservers; most operators will agree that the most actively trafficed domains are the most important to maintain reachability to. BIND's selection algorithm will bias this however, so you would need to take a sample across several or all. (Actually, this would be an interesting way to study the effects of BIND's selection algorithm and see if it's doing the right thing.) -- Shields.