ICANN And The Domain Game

MSNBC has a nice summary of the applications for new top-level domains recently filed with ICANN, which ICANN has just completed placing online. As you contemplate the applications, and perhaps consider commenting on them in ICANN's comment forum, this piece by Brock Meeks may come in handy for placing things in perspective. (Our last ICANN story explores this same topic.)

Comments

Re:Lobby for the support of BIND maintainers...

[wowbagger]

There's no need to modify BIND: all that is needed is to modify the data on the root name servers. The problem is that ICANN won't allow new TLDs to be added to the root name servers. There are two possible solutions to this:

1. The US government forces ICANN to accept new root server entries from anybody with a specified level of support (I wouldn't want JethroBillyBob's Internet and Oil Change to be able to create a new TLD, unless Jethro has several big servers).
2. Somebody creates a new set of root name servers, and people start pointing their name servers at them instead.

The former offends my Libertarian views, the latter has been tried with some success. However, as Metcalf's law states, the value of a network varies as the square of the number of nodes in the network: as second heirarchy of name servers is useful only if it has a significant number of users. Perhaps if a consortium of the larger ISPs got together, and made it their default, it might work.

However, do we wish to trade ICANN for AOL/UUNet/Qwest/Microsoft?