[dns-wg] Re: WG response to root scaling studies

On 16 Oct 2009, at 11:11, Stephane Bortzmeyer wrote:

>   * more TLD (may be a false problem or not, depending on the actual
>   number. I was shocked at the DNS meeting to hear a participant
>   making repeated references to one million TLD, a ridiculous number,
>   that could never be reached, due to ICANN constraints

Stephane, it's very unwise to make this claim.

Yes, 1 million TLDs is ridiculous and very probably unattainable under  
the current ICANN system. However there was an ICANN paper that last  
year said "if .com can have ~100M delegations, so can the root". See http://www.icann.org/en/topics/dns-stability-draft-paper-06feb08.pdf 
. On p4 under "II Capacity of the Root Zone", it says "At a minimum,  
the DNS should be able to function at its current level with at least  
60 million TLDs. This allows significant room for large-scale  
expansion without concerns about a negative effect on stability." I  
wonder who wrote that...

Now us technical people realise those claims are beyond ridiculous.  
But when these are presented to non-technical people, the consequences  
are not pretty.

I also stumbled across the comment below (from a French government  
official BTW) at http://syd.icann.org/files/meetings/sydney2009/transcript-root-zone-scaling-22jun09-en.txt

"For, once again, people who are outside of the technical environment,  
one of the arguments that is often used to say you can have an  
unlimited number of TLDs is that, basically, it's not that different  
from the management of a very big registry like dot com that has 80  
million domain names. Can you very briefly or point to something that  
can explain to a relatively layperson, the major difference between  
the two systems and in particular whether in terms of the rates of  
updates and the number of distribution of replication of the file, a  
dot com manager does, how applicable is the analogy or not? Because  
it's an analogy that we hear a lot in the policy environment."

The mindset that ".com can be replicated in the root" is taking root  
(excuse the pun) in certain ICANN circles. If that view prevails, it's  
very likely ICANN will get railroaded into devising a TLD creation  
mechanism to accommodate millions of TLDs. The current proposals for  
new gTLDs point the way here. The gNSO effectively said "let there be  
thousands of gTLDs". ICANN management then pretty much said "The  
community has spoken. We will do what the process determined.". So if/ 
when the gNSO says "let's have millions of TLDs: we have an ICANN  
paper which says it's feasible and won't create instability", I would  
not bet against ICANN staff trying to devise a process to make that  
happen.