DNS and potential energy
Marshall Eubanks
tme at multicasttech.com
Tue Jul 1 13:32:00 UTC 2008
On Jul 1, 2008, at 1:43 AM, James Hess wrote:
>> 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,
There is the question of the fee structure. If the fee is really > $
100,000 USD, then
this will damp down the numbers considerably.
Here is a way to estimate this - by my estimate, there are something
like 1 million worldwide companies with
revenues > $ 5 million USD / yr. The companies I have dealt with
making ~ $ 5 million / year are hesitant to spend $ 100 K on
_anything_, but maybe TLDs will be seen as the thing to have. So, I
could imagine 1 million TLDs at this price level, maybe, but not many
more, and maybe substantially less.
How many .com domains are there ? I have a _2001_ report of 19
million. I would guess maybe 50 million by now.
Would adding 1 million TLDs really be worse for the DNS system than 50
or 100 million dot com domains ?
Of course, this depends on the crucial question of the fee. If it
drops to $ 100 USD, then I could certainly imagine a similar number to
the number of dot com domains, i.e., many millions.
This seems like a good place to ask if any of that ICANN money is
going to the root domains...
>
> 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"
I personally doubt it, for the same reason that there is shoes.com but
not
nike.shoes.com.
To me, the notion that people will find the shoes they want on the web
by starting at http://www.shoes seems
archaic, very 1995.
What there may be is a raft of trademark lawsuits - for example,
Shoes.com, Inc. a subsidiary of Brown Shoe Company (NYSE:BWS)
presumably has some sort of trademark rights to "shoes.com". Nobody
has rights
to "shoes," so expect some fights here (as a potential example,
between the future owners of "shoes" and companies like Nike, and
maybe also shoes.com. IANAL, but I suspect that Brown Show might be
able to claim that ".Shoes" might infringe on the "shoes.com" mark).
Regards
Marshall
>
>
>
> 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
>
More information about the NANOG
mailing list