Re: [wg-review] 11 [IDNH] individual domain name owners, Report requested by ...

[Sandy Harris <sandy@storm.ca>]

ZFASSETT@aol.com wrote:

> << 3. Which of ICANN's functions would you say it is appropriate for "real end
>  users" to comment on? >>
> 
> Let me, if you will, expand upon this question a little further.  Increasing
> the TLD space is one of the functions of the ICANN that impacts all internet
> users - from technology experts to individual domain name holders.

Yes.

> Does this
> working group at all look to address the enormous subjectivity that entered
> into the recent ICANN recommendations to the DoC?  Can this working group be
> of assistance in proposing the technology guidelines that would have the
> effect of minimizing such subjectivity of applications in the future?

There are very few guidelines that can be based on technical requirements:

There is no absolute technical requirement for a single set of root servers,
though there seems to be a reasonable technical argument that doing it that
way makes the system easier to manage.

For straightforward technical reasons (mainly limits on server RAM), you
don't want any level of the domain hierarchy to get too large. For example,
(using nuimbers straight out of my head for purposes of illustration), if
.com has a million second-level domains and each record takes a K, you
need a gigabyte just to have records in memory for fast access. This
increases if you need to handle reverse lookups and again when records
are enlarged to include keys for secure DNS.

At some point (I suspect .com at least has long since passed it) you want,
say, 1000 top-level domains with 1000 second-level each rather than the one
big TLD with a million. Or maybe a million is fine on current servers, but
5 million is a disater, so you need to split it 10 ways. I'm not at all
clear on the exact numbers, just the principle.

Of course, while almost certainly a good idea technically, this is likely
wildly impractical in the real world. Imagine the fuss if ICANN did the
obviously techincally correct thing, closed off new .com registrations
and started killing unused or redundant ones.

As far as I can tell, those are the only technical constraints. All the real
issues here are political or organisational.