ICANNWatch on the NRC DNS Report

[David Farber <dave () farber net>]

------ Forwarded Message
From: "Michael Froomkin - U.Miami School of Law" <froomkin () law miami edu>
Reply-To: <froomkin () law tm>
Date: Thu, 31 Mar 2005 14:33:59 -0500 (EST)
To: Dave Farber <dave () farber net>
Subject: ICANNWatch on the NRC DNS Report

Today the National Academy of Sciences' National Research Council (NRC)
released its report on "Internet Navigation and the Domain Name System".

The most important conclusion in the report is that it lays to rest, once
and for all, any lingering technical controversies about the addition of
new top-level domains.

<blockquote>The Committee did not find any purely technical reasons that
the root name servers could not provide the same level of response with a
much larger root zone file. Indeed, the ability of the .com name servers
to respond to billions of queries a day against the .com zone file, with
over 20 million entries, is a demonstration of the technical capacity that
could be applied to the root zone, if necessary.</blockquote>

The only technical arguments put forward against new TLDs suggested that
it was necessary to limit the rate of addition. The committee agreed that
the acceptable rate is tens of TLDs - which means anywhere from 20 to 90
per period. The committee thus arrived at the following conclusion:

<blockquote>Considering technical and operational performance alone, the
addition of tens of gTLDs per year for several years would pose minimal
risk to the stability of the root.</blockquote>

Old hands in the DNS wars will immediately be reminded of two pieces of
ancient history: First, that Jon Postel himself proposed adding 50 new
TLDs per year to the root.   Second, that in all the years of its
operation, ICANN - - which claims to be a technical coordination body
(when that suits it) - - and which is single-handedly responsible for the
current artificial cap on new TLDs never once dared commission a study of
what would be technologically safe...perhaps because it feared the answer.

...read the rest at
http://www.icannwatch.org/article.pl?sid=05/03/31/0057215

-- 
http://www.icannwatch.org   Personal Blog: http://www.discourse.net
A. Michael Froomkin   |    Professor of Law    |   froomkin () law tm
U. Miami School of Law, P.O. Box 248087, Coral Gables, FL 33124 USA
+1 (305) 284-4285  |  +1 (305) 284-6506 (fax)  |  http://www.law.tm
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