DNS and potential energy

Tue Jul 1 05:43:54 UTC 2008

> 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,
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"

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