RE: Structuring the Root

["Roeland M.J. Meyer" <rmeyer at mhsc.com>]

At 13:18 4/22/98 -0500, Jim Fleming wrote:
>On Wednesday, April 22, 1998 12:32 PM, Roeland M.J.
Meyer[SMTP:rmeyer at mhsc.com] wrote:
>@At 07:22 4/22/98 -0500, Jim Fleming wrote:
>@
>@>In the IPv8 Plan there are 2,048 slots. This is like tracking the
>@
>@Here is a major problem I have with this, limited "slots", Why??!
>@
>@I have never ehard, or read, any valid reason for limiting TLDs, that
>@wasn't pure speculative BS, or driven by some "hidden" commercial agenda.
>@___________________________________________________ 
>
>There does not have to be any hard limit, but people
>have to start someplace. At the present time, there
>are almost 256 widely known TLDs in the world. To
>increase that to a couple of thousand seems like a
>large increase. Also, 2,000+ is twice as many categories
>as Peter Roget decided to use in the 1800s. His
>thesaurus has worked well for many years.

This is a reason? Just becasue "Grand Pa did it that way" ? ... NOT.

I can, of course, replay last months agruments from DOMAIN-POLICY, but I'll
summarize instead.

1) Country-Codes (CC) are brain-damaged. Any business getting on the
Internet is, by definition, looking towards INTERNATIONAL markets. Local
markets are already being served. The whole thrust of Internet business is
to expand markets beyond what is available locally. There are also ample
reasons already stated why CC do NOT work. If someone wishes to see
corroboration, in detail, I can supply this from my archives.

2) Catagories are brain-damaged. In the modern flux of business markets, it
is quite possible for a corp to want to do business in multiple catagories.
During the course of time, a corp may abandon one catagory in favor of
another.

Both of the above are shown to be inadequate over time.Notice that most of
the growth is under .COM and .NET, withj some over-flow into .ORG. It is
this over-flow which should give a REAL STRONG clue that there is something
wrong with catagory designations.

>If you want the engineering reason for why IPv8 has
>2,048 it is because there are 11 extra addressing bits
>and 2 to the 11th power is 2,048. If you want to know
>why there are only 11 extra addressing bits, I can
>go into detail, but the bottom line is that this is all
>that could be squeezed into the existing IPv4 header.
>If you want more, use IPv6.

Why are TLDs tied to IP numbers? That is the job of DNS and the root-server
for the TLD. Direct mapping of TLD slots into DNS name-space would be a
HUGE mistake. It will also kill the TLD registry business. Right now, there
are no logical limits to the number of TLD registries. Each root-server is
authoritative for a NAME-SPACE, not an IP address. The process of
registration links an IP-BLOCK to a NAME-SPACE, but the mapping itself is
virtual. To begin hard-coding it into the IP allocation scheme is a huge
step backwards. I think it an unacceptable one.

An IP-BLOCK registry assigns IP-BLOCK and a TLD registry assigns NAMES. DNS
ties the two axis together dynamically. Logically, it's possible to have
two incongruent IP-BLOCKS be referred to by the same DNS name-server and
that name-server would be authoritative, for that domain name.

>As for "hidden" commercial agendas...you can look
>for those forever. As you look keep asking yourself who
>gets paid for all of the work that goes into these debates
>and who does not. I find it interesting that many of the
>people involved object to people being paid when they
>are assigned by their employer to work on this full-time.
>In my case, that is not the case. How about you ?

That wasn't the point. Most of those that I've seen argue for restricted
TLD-space were trying to achieve a supply-side shortage which would
increase market price for those TLDs allowed to exist. I see this as
market-manipulation of the most evil kind. This applies especially to those
same folk that allowed pre-registration, for their private buddies, at one
price, and an order-of-magnitude price increase for everyone else. If we
are to do open markets then let's do OPEN markets.

___________________________________________________ 
Roeland M.J. Meyer, ISOC (InterNIC RM993) 
e-mail: <mailto:rmeyer at mhsc.com>mailto:rmeyer at mhsc.com
Personal web pages: <http://www.mhsc.com/~rmeyer>http://www.mhsc.com/~rmeyer
Company web-site: <http://www.mhsc.com/>http://www.mhsc.com/
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