[dns-operations] When TLDs have apex A records

[Jorge Amodio]

>> I gather that Ed, presumably backed up by Randy, Jorge, and others,
>> asserts
>>  the consensus on wildcarding in TLDs is for allowing it and that the
>> recent resolution by ICANN's board is an unacceptable abridgment of the
>> rights of gTLD administrators.  This is what I feel we'll have to agree
>> to disagree on.
>
> Who is Jorge?

Apologies in advance for the delayed follow up, I took some time off during the
hot summer we are having in Texas.

This thread is obviously sliding OT but I don’t know any other forum outside
ICANN’s umbrella where this type of techno-poli discussions take place.

Just for clarification and set the record straight:

I do not believe ICANN is evil and the staff is incompetent, au
contrarie I believe
ICANN is an important part of today’s Internet and has an important role to
play (if they do what is under its mandate and expected from it). I didn’t have
much interaction with the ICANN staff but so far with the ones I had the
opportunity to exchange ideas, comments or ask for support, I’ve no complains.

I do not believe the problem is the “wildcards”. IMHO the problem is ICANN
dictating what you can or can not do with a facility or feature that
is part of a
specification that has been there for long time, this sounds like the W3C
dictating that you should not use the <img> tag part of the HTML spec because
bad guys use it to post child pornography on web pages.
Obviously some folks will take advantage or make bad use of some facilities
which is another problem, but if there is a real need to change the
specification
there are well established venues and processes for that.

I do not believe that using wildcards on TLDs is a good practice, unless you
have a very good clue about what you are doing and the consequences and
side effects to others affected by it and how it will change the
expected behavior
of DNS responses for particular applications.

I do believe ICANN and the Internet community did the right thing and put a
very strong argument why SiteFinder was a very bad idea.

I still have a hard time finding a convincing argument for the necessity for
additional gTLDs. Couple of years ago the introduction of new TLDs was
supposed to be a “proof of concept” experiment to gather experience and
baseline statistics, unfortunately some of the new TLDs were released before
anybody had a good idea or the tools to collect the data and establish a model.

I believe the root scalability study should have started before the
writing of the
new gTLD application bible. Without getting into technical details now, I don’t
think IANA is ready to handle the workload of 300K TLDs, technology could be
more easy to scale, but people, processes, tools, etc, do not scale that easy.
And this is without even thinking about how the issue gets more complex with
IPv6 RRs, DNSSEC, and IDN.

Much less sense makes to me the discussion about some geo gTLDs like
city names, as far as I remember cities are associated with countries that
already have their own ccTLD, why do not let them decide and manage city
names under their own ccTLDs without creating an extremely complex process
to determine who is the rightful entity applying for such geo gTLD when the
same city/town/county/province/younameit could be used in many places
around the globe.

I do believe ICANN is spending too much money to fund some individuals/entities
of dubious representation. Being a not-for-profit corporation they have to spend
or return the money, and ICANN is collecting large sums without too much
effort. I don’t have an MBA but I can clearly see that spending in the order of
$50-60M/yr for what ICANN does (better said what is supposed to do) is a big
waste of money that could be used for better purposes.

And, to finish my rant, I’m sick tired of the discussions about “USG
vs the world”
and “the root zone monopoly”.

Who am I ?  Google me.

Warmest Regards
Jorge