[governance] new TLDs?

[Milton Mueller]

McTim:

The National Academy of Sciences study pretty much settled the debate
over whether the root zone can handle new TLDs.
http://www7.nationalacademies.org/cstb/pub_dns_summary.pdf  It
concluded that periodic (say annual) addition of less than 100 per year
would create no risk worth worrying about. Others believe that the rate
could be much faster but the consensus position was the extremely
conservative one. Paul Vixie is on record as saying that you could have
a million. Your fears about the size of the root zone file are pretty
far off base. Currently, the zone file is a text file of about 120k. You
can make that a lot bigger without causing any problems. Really, you
don't need to reinvent the wheel, check into the studies that have
already been done before throwing uninformed opinions into an already
chaotic debate. 

Also, when Hans refers to "worthless" TLDs he means, I suspect,
"elimination of the artificial scarcity value" of a TLD, not that the
name itself is worthless. This is Economics 101. If you massively
restrict the supply of something it becomes scarcer and thus more
valuable economically and more likely to provoke political battles.
Since the DNS can handle lots more TLDs there is no reason to create
these restrictions on supply and hence no need to fight over it. Think
of how we handle second-level names. While I am sure there are a few
backward-looking folks who wish we doled those out as restrictively as
TLDs, I think most would agree that 

>>> McTim <dogwallah at gmail.com> 08/29/05 1:55 PM >>>

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