> So, place your bets on which slippery slopes ICANN takes us down... ICANN loves these "sponsored" TLDs. It's the only kind they are presently considering. Sponsors generally have the cash needed to cover ICANN's application fee (which is typically on the order of $35,000 to $50,000, and is non-refundable even if the application is turned down or left in an indefinite limbo of being neither accepted nor rejected) and any ongoing tithes. (Remember, ICANN's budget is growing towards $10,000,000USD per year and that money has to come from somewhere.) And the "sponsors" generally have well a behaved and limited membership and are thus less likely to burden ICANN staff with work and are less likely to get into disputes (and lawsuits) with ICANN. I personally find many of the proposed uses for these "sponsored" TLDs rather silly and non-innovative - and they could well be done further down the DNS hierarchy and their only reason to be at the top level is for the prestige (and image marketing value) of having top level domain status. There are a couple of things about this situation: First, is that some of the TLD proposals before ICANN, such as .mobi, might contain some seeds of technical harm to the net. For example, if the .mobi folks don't use their own intermediate caching resolvers and rather allow all those mobile devices to go directly to the roots then there could be an increase in the traffic going to root and other servers. This could be exacerbated if those devices are frequently power cycled and lose their DNS caches. The .mobi folks haven't said that they are going to do this, but then again they haven't said that they are aware of this potential issue. Second, the idea that a TLD categorizes all of the resource records of all types found under that TLD seems to me to be wrong. For instance, assume there's a TLD called "blue". if an A record found under a.b.c.blue leads me to an IP address on an interface, it is unreasonable to believe that the only services delivered via that address are of a "blue" nature. I suspect that many people who want these TLDs think of the net only in the limited sense of the world wide web. Third is that, as Tony Hain mentioned, there is trademark pressure that will eventually suggest to every big trademark holder that they ought to be a TLD. This may or not come to pass, but we can guess that at least some of the big trademark folks will give it a try, particularly after some of ICANN's "sponsored" TLDs ossify over time into de facto marks and thus blaze a trail that trademark owners might want to follow. And where one trademark owner goes, the herd is sure to follow. My own view is that we ought to be trying to shape the DNS tree so that it is well shaped in terms of width and depth of the hierarchy. I don't know the metrics of that shape. Have there been studies regarding the how the efficiency of DNS and DNS caching vary with DNS label depth and zone width? As for uses of TLDs - my own view is that as long as they are allocated only rarely then the few awards should go to those uses that contain the maximum innovation, maximimum flexibility, and give the greatest value to the users of the net. But I don't see why allocation of new TLDs needs to be a rare event. Personally, I want a lot of new TLDs, so that folks who have silly ideas and silly business models can try em out and be given a chance to flop - but this means that there needs to be a criteria to determine flopness and to reap the failed TLDs so they don't become dead zones in the DNS hierarchy. And I think it ought to be a requirement that any idea proposed for a TLD first be prototyped somewhere down the DNS hierarchy. Anybody who wants a new TLD should have to pledge allegance to the end-to-end principle (i.e. no new "sitefinder"s) and promise to adhere to applicable internet technical standards and practices. I also would like to start to break the semantic implications of TLD names - I'd prefer that any new ones have names that are meaningless in any language, like "ts4-0k7m". Yeah this has been gone over many times - but I still have this hope that with some nudging people will stop using DNS as a directory. --karl-- _______________________________________________ Ietf@xxxxxxxx https://www1.ietf.org/mailman/listinfo/ietf