Re: NSI and competition to RIPE and APNIC
At 10:22 AM 05/12/97 CDT, Stan Barber wrote:
Carl writes:
And the outcome of all this affects every Nanog member. It affects every network operator, every ISP, every sysop. It affects the 1.2 million owners of the 1.2 million domain names in COM and NET and ORG. Every network operator, every SIP, every sysop, every domain name owner, should pay attention to all of this and speak up.
Carl, I don't think there are 1.2 million domain name registrants as many domains (like CyberPromo, for example) has registered multiple domains names.
Nowadays, taking annual fees into account, the number of parties owning thousands of domain names is dropping quickly. Okay, so let's say it is a ten-to-one ratio (which it's not, I believe it is more like 1.5 to one) then the number of domain name owners would still be 120,000. And those 120,000 owners should still be speaking up, in the absence of which things may happen that they won't like later.
That being said, there is already an alternative in the county code domains. There, the policies are different (though not necessarily better) than NSI.
That is no comfort at all, none whatsoever, to someone who has invested years of time and sweat and energy and money in a COM domain name. If the answer is, "Hey, you don't like NSI's domain name policy? So give up your domain name and start over again in a two-letter domain!" then it is no answer at all.
That's not to say that the exising gTLD infrastructure does not need to evolve. It must. I agree with you that those who are domain name registrants in the current gTLDs have a stake in this evolution and should express a thoughtful and constructive opinion on how this evolution should take place. Unfortunately, some who have expressed opinions have chosen not to be either thoughtful or constructive. I think some operators have been reluctant to participate because of this.
As I am sure you are also aware, the present structure of the .US domain is unworkable for any business that is located in more than one state, or for any business that thinks it might ever move from one state to another. There ought to be a .com.us, for example, and at present there isn't one.
Since this is NANOG, I decided that some technical/numeric accuracy was good:
Nowadays, taking annual fees into account, the number of parties owning thousands of domain names is dropping quickly. Okay, so let's say it is a ten-to-one ratio (which it's not, I believe it is more like 1.5 to one) ...
1.2 million doesn't apply to COM, it appears to be the estimate of the combined size of COM, NET, and ORG. Last week when I measured it, COM had 942952 delegations under it (that is, second level domains) but they were served by only 54292 discrete nameservers. (Note that DNS's anti- aliasing is weak, and given BIND 8.1's virtual hosting capabilities it is likely that those 54292 "nameservers" are running on some smaller number of real live actual physical hosts.) However, given the raw numbers the ratio is such that the mathematically average nameserver has 17.36 COM zones delegated to it (which includes master ("primary") and slave ("secondaary").) Eventually I'll start doing histograms so I can tell y'all what the mean is and how lopsided the figures really are. Suffice to say that 1.5 is the wrong number, and that 10 is actually closer to the truth.
On Mon, 12 May 1997 09:50:48 -0400 carl@oppedahl.com (Carl Oppedahl) wrote: [...]
As I am sure you are also aware, the present structure of the .US domain is unworkable for any business that is located in more than one state, or for any business that thinks it might ever move from one state to another.
Since over the past many decades, having to use a specific street address in a specific city and state hasn't been "unworkable" for multinational corporations to do business anywhere, I hardly think that a .US domain address should be any different. I am not aware of any restrictions in the .US domain spec that says you have to restrict your Internet business or Internet operational reach to any locality. Likewise, businesses have moved from one state to another in the past and the change of address has not been "unworkable." Difficult sometimes and inconvenient often, but not unworkable.
There ought to be a .com.us, for example, and at present there isn't one.
The US is different from most other nations in that we have a federation of states, a specific internal division of several semi-autonomous political and geographic entities to divide things down to more manageable size. Besides, it helps deepen the DNS heirarchy. In a nation of our size and economic activity, that is very helpful and perhaps necessary. Creating .com.us does very little to help the name overlap problems we see in the current .com domain. It just adds 3 more characters to most of the domain names. Ya picks your system: geographic heirarchy (.US), category types (IAHC), even Barry Shein's phone number system, and ya gets your goods and your bads. It all depends on which problems you care most about solving. None of the systems does them all. None of them can be classified as "unworkable." -- Dennis Fazio Minnesota Regional Network -- Gabnet: (612) 362-5850
participants (3)
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Carl Oppedahl -
Dennis Fazio -
Paul A Vixie