questions and answers about IAHC

Thu Feb 6 06:05:03 UTC 1997

Someone who shall remain nameless asked me a question in followup to the
discussions of new domains that went by on NANOG earlier today.  I think
there's enough confusion on the topic that a more general answer will do
some good; note that this is not a North American issue per se, but it
did show up here earlier so here goes.  Note that no answers on this
subject can be considered authoritative unless they come from the IANA.

> I seem to have lost sight of the tld debates, though now there
> seems to be a bit of generally accepted minutiae that it will
> happen and become common.
>
> Is this your opinion?

Yes.

>  What do you think about Curran's volunteering to host zones?

I think he was making the point that it's a technical problem, amenable
to technical solutions, if not enough people see dollars in it and do it
for the dollar (or ruble, or whatever) reason.  And in this, he's right.

> Why did Fleming respond that he'd have to "get in line" with
> everyone else?  Is there money to be made in hosting the zone?
> Perhaps you've knowledge of a FAQ or web site with ifno?

Fleming is a pirate.  He, and a bunch of other flamers calling eachother
names like "AlterNIC" and "Root-64", believe that the unmet public demand
for new entries in "." has created an opportunity for a coup.  I disagree.

Of the ~40000 name servers listed in a *.COM "NS RR", ~0.01% answered with
pirate data last time I surveyed them.  The other ~99.99% said NXDOMAIN.  I
draw from this the conclusion that any pirated preuse of an IAHC-recommended
gTLD has precisely zero market standing and will shortly disappear.

> What does gTLD stand for?

Generic Top Level Domain.  We used to call them iTLD's ("international") but
the IAHC decided, for several reasons, to call them gTLD's instead.

> BIND won't required any modifications, assuming something like
> .biz is introduced with .com, right?

It's just 1's and 0's.  As I've pointed out, BIND doesn't care if you put
in a half million names in the "." zone.  It's all hashing and malloc()'s.

> What do you think we should be doing wrt this issue?

I think you should read the final report shown on http://www.iahc.org/, and
that you should decide whether your customers will be well served by a
coherent, unified namespace whose management is open to public debate and
to competitive (non-monopoly) registries.

I very much think that they will be.  A network with multiple incoherent
allocation authorities, which is what the DNS pirates wanted, would utterly
have failed.  On the other hand a network with no clearly defined allocation
mechanism for new names under "." was not serving anybody well, either.