Re: [dns-wg] Elimination of 2nd level ccTLD domain names

[Jim Reid <]

>>>>> "Brad" == Brad Knowles brad@localhost writes:

    Brad> 	I have been talking about nothing *but* ccTLDs in
    Brad> Europe, and how this flat namespace model will not continue
    Brad> to scale.

Brad, you're being silly.

The only real constraint on scaling will be the availablity of names
to register. That is inherently self-correcting by the market place.
People will register names in a given TLD for as long as they perceive
those registrations to have some meaning and value. Whether that limit
is reached after 1 name or 1 billion names is irrelevant. Sure, as the
registrations increase, the operational problems and data management
issues for the registry will increase. But so too will the amount of
money and other resources needed to solve those problems.

    >> Plus the fact that a generic, worldwide and *flat* TLD like
    >> .com still hasn't grown such as to become unmanageable?

    Brad> 	It has grown to the point where it is not manageable.
    Brad> It was unmanageable a long time ago, and things have been
    Brad> going further down the toilet ever since.

This will come as a big surprise to the tens of thousands of people
who register or renew .com domain names every day. And to the folk at
Verisign's registry. FYI, the gtld-servers.net run ATLAS, Verisign's
own DNS implementation. It has a database back-end and does multi-site
replication. Rapid propagation of changes is easy. Verisign no longer
generate a 1-2 Gb zone file and load it into BIND servers twice a day.
If they did, your point about the manageability of .com might have
some credence.

    Brad> 	And you're going to have a problem that will be an
    Brad> order of magnitude larger than .com.

So what? To get to that problem, the zone would have to have an order
of magnitude more registrations than .com has today. Assuming .eu was
ever be that popular, which is at best a highly debatable assumption.

Let's do some back of the envelope calculations. A zone that was an
order of magnitude as big as .com would have around 200M entries. At 5
Euro/registration/year -- comparable to the wholesale prices most TLD
registries charge today -- this would yield an annual income of 1B
Euro. With that amount of money at the .eu registry's disposal, any
hardware or software limitations in their DNS (related) operations
could be solved from petty cash.

I can't be alone in wanting to have as little as 1% of that sort of
budget to solve DNS problems. :-)