> > It doesn't matter who selects the TLDs; all that matters is that there > > be a consistent set. all that matters technically, that is. nontechnical reasons (like who gets the money, or whose friends get the money, seem to matter quite a bit.) > Well, it also matters that the set be constrained to some degree. > A large flat root would not be very managable, manageability is in the eye of the manager. i'm sure there are plenty of companies who would line up to take their share of the money if "." were opened to rapacious land-grabbing development on the order of ".COM" today. i'm equally sure that it would be "managed" perfectly well from the point of view of the managers and even from the point of view of the domain holders. the trouble is, tlds today have some mneumonic value left in them, whereas if there were billions of them, more would have to be written and fewer could simply be spoken or remembered. that's a "human factors" problem but before y'all point and laugh and say it isn't technical, recall that if not for humans, we'd just use dotted quads and coloned hex. domains are a crutch, and it's not clear that a crutch with 45 million rubber feet on it would be of any use to anybody. > and caches wouldn't be very effective with large numbers of TLDs. if you mean that you think there might end up being a large number of queries sent to the root name servers, most of which are avoidable if people were more sensible, then duane wessels has got some bad news for you. -- Paul Vixie