> Beware academic speculation, it has a tendency to obsess on the > exact wrong thing. Indeed. (And I should know, having taken eight years to get my PhD.) >From a technical point of view, the registry/registrar model works fine. I have plenty of bad things to say about VRSN, but it is hard to deny that their registry is very reliable and plenty fast, despite having a TLD zone that is probably four orders of magnitude bigger than anyone imagined when the DNS was designed. It is even surviving the completely needless crisis of domain tasting, with millions of unpaid domains added and deleted every day. The problems are all political and administrative. Registries charge six bucks per domain, while their actual cost is more like a quarter, and ICANN in their grand naivete appears poised to let them all raise the price rather than pushing it down toward cost. Registries' primary goal is to make money rather than to serve their clients, so there's constant pressure to steal traffic with wildcards, sell traffic data to the highest bidder, and other user-hostile antics. When I first proposed the registry/registrar model in 1996, I assumed that the registries would be co-ops owned by the registrars and run to recover costs, exactly to prevent the sorts of problems we see with registries whose interests are opposed to their registrars. Too bad people only seem to have read the first half of my paper. But it's not just registry/registrar issues. As someone noted a few days ago, ICANN and the current roots have yet to address the issues related to IDNs. There's only one significant technical issue, mapping non-unique Unicode strings into unique DNS names, and we seem finally to be getting a handle on that. But there's a raft of significant non-technical issues to address as well. Should registries prevent registrations of homographs, and if so, what rule(s) do you use to define homographs, and what do you do when you find them? If we add non-English TLDs, do we add a hundred local language equivalents of com, org, net, and so forth? If we do, are they aliases for each other, or do we suddenly get 300 new TLDs? ICANN has not to date dealt very effectively with these issues, but they are real issues that will have a great effect on people who use the DNS every day, and they're not technical issues, since all of the alternatives are equally feasible technically. So, basically, I'm not sure what people are arguing about here. The DNS of 2006 is not the DNS of 1992. Deal with it, we're not going back. Regards, John Levine, johnl@xxxxxxxx, Primary Perpetrator of "The Internet for Dummies", Information Superhighwayman wanna-be, http://www.johnlevine.com, Mayor "More Wiener schnitzel, please", said Tom, revealingly. _______________________________________________ Ietf@xxxxxxxx https://www1.ietf.org/mailman/listinfo/ietf