[governance] Help create the .nyc Internet space for New York

[Karl Auerbach]

Sylvia Caras wrote:

> For me, a central part of the top level domain conversation is how
> many might there be.

 From a technical perspective the technical burden of serving a root 
zone to the net is equivalent serving a TLD zone.

Today the .com zone runs with roughly 70,000,000 names.  .com runs 
reliably and with an acceptable administrative error rate.  Verisign has 
done a good technical job.

The experience we have from .com tells us that it is technically 
feasible to run a root zone with 70,000,000 names both reliably and with 
an acceptable administrative error rate.

If ICANN were to allow 50 new TLDs every business day - roughly 10,000 
new TLDs per year, it would take us about 7,000 years to reach a number 
of TLDs that we know can readily be provided and supported using today's 
hardware, technology, and administrative procedures.

We have known this fact for years - see, for example what I wrote on 
this in year 2000: 
http://www.cavebear.com/archive/ialc/platform.htm#dnspol-tldpol

Just to make sure that this thought experiment wasn't floating on air 
several years ago a couple of us ran an actual experiment in which we 
grabbed a copy of the then existing .com zone - something on the order 
of 30,000,000 names at that time - and elevated it to be a root zone on 
a PC-based server.  The poor machine, a relatively standard PC running 
linux, gagged, groaned, and memory swapped/paged its way as fast as the 
poor disk could run - but it worked.

I also created some synthetic zone files with a mix of randomly 
generated names of various lengths (this was done to make sure we well 
exercised any caches with a realistic mix of cache misses) and ran 
synthetic queries, with a controlled number of queries for non-existent 
names.  Again, we ran out of machine horsepower/memory before we hit any 
DNS specific technical limit on the number of names.

(Unfortunately, since this was a spare-time-in-the-evening task, we did 
not publish our findings in a nice concise technical paper.  Silly us. 
And the machines have long since been recycled and the data/software 
lost among ancient backups.)

Since that time, machines have gotten much bigger and faster.  Moreover, 
it is possible to partition DNS traffic so that, for example, queries 
for names beginning with the letters a-f go to one machine, those with 
g-l to another, etc.

What I'm getting at here is that those who are waiving red flags of fear 
at even small numbers of new TLDs are doing so for reasons that are not 
technical but for some other reason, mainly protection of some economic 
interest.

This is why we need always take care to distinguish between governance 
to promote the public interest and governance that is really a tool to 
protect somebody's bank account.

		--karl--
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