[dns-operations] Karl Auerbach on adding 'millions' more TLD - what do folks think about the operational impact?

[Patrik Fältström]

On 8 jan 2007, at 23.11, Douglas Otis wrote:

> There might be a desire to introduce ACE TLDs thereby permitting
> users to stay within their native language.  Should there be
> replications of translated TLDs into various languages, or should
> these "internationalized" TLDs be fully independent of their ASCII
> counterparts?  Internationalization might have a significant impact
> on the number of TLDs, and would be hard to stop.

6000 languages times 300 TLDs = more zones than today.

Yes, we might be far away from the number of TLDs that can be  
handled, but the questions for me has always been (1) how do we say  
no to TLD N+1 and (2) why should we create more TLDs, because we can?

Will we get the same size of the root zone as .COM, and how fast? I  
think we talk about at least the size of the largest 2nd level domain  
of today. Why should not anyone that have foo.bar today not register  
just foo tomorrow? Was not the idea that the DNS data structure  
should be hierarchal to make caching and the protocol more efficient?  
What happens if the data structure ends up being flat? HOSTS.TXT  
anyone, with DNS only as the distribution protocol?

Other difficult questions are, I think, what responsibilities "we"  
have (for some definition of "we") that a domain name that is  
registered will always be in DNS even if the registry go "poof" and  
who should be the registry for a given TLD. And million of other  
questions of course that have nothing to do with the value of N.

    Patrik