[dns-operations] When TLDs have apex A records

[David Conrad]

Jorge,

On Jul 9, 2009, at 9:34 AM, Jorge Amodio wrote:
> 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.

Your analogy would apply more to the IAB/IETF than ICANN.  Perhaps a  
better analogy would be the FCC disallowing telephone companies from  
redirecting all unassigned telephone numbers to directory services  
(yeah, I know it's a flawed analogy).

> 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.

And what happens when folks who run TLDs either do not have very good  
clues or, worse, have very good clues and are intentionally misusing  
the feature?

Perhaps apropos: http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/07/08/pre-order-your-cm-domain-now-start-making-money-off-domain-typos-soon/

(Note that ICANN does not have any mechanism of control over ccTLDs  
like .CM)

> I still have a hard time finding a convincing argument for the  
> necessity for
> additional gTLDs.

I understand (and have some sympathy with) this view.  However, this  
discussion has been going on for more than 10 years now and ICANN has  
tried lots of different approaches "to privatize the management of the  
domain name system (DNS) in a manner that increases  
competition ..." (from the original USG MoU with ICANN). There are  
valid arguments on both sides.

> I believe the root scalability study should have started before the  
> writing of the new gTLD application bible.

I'd agree.

> 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.

I'd agree with this too, however I'd note that if IANA needs to scale,  
it can (after all, if new gTLDs are sufficiently successful to stress  
IANA, there will be funds to grow IANA).

> I do believe ICANN is spending too much money to fund some  
> individuals/entities
> of dubious representation.

There are far better places to discuss ICANN's budget or particular  
aspects of http://www.icann.org/en/planning/ops-budget-framework-09.pdf.

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

Me too.  :-)

Regards,
-drc