the registries, and just be in a contractual relationship to receive
updated zone files. Also, there could be contractual links between
the various registries, some of them could be part of a chain ("Domain
Names R Us") and so on. In general, I would like to leave those
relationships as unspecified as possible, to leave as much
organizational freedom as possible. (Of course, there will probably
have to be certain requirements on registries imposed by license
agreements with IANA, but those requirements should be as light as
possible.)
I guess another wrinkle is that a registry could serve several TLDs.
Hmmm.
- --
Kent Crispin "No reason to get excited",
kent@songbird.com the thief he kindly spoke...
----------------------------------------------------------------------
Date: 2 Aug 1996 15:46:01 -0700
From: johnl@iecc.com (John R Levine)
Subject: Re: name precedence
>Anyone know about precedents wrt phone numbers? The same problem
>should occur with any new area code (some numbers are better than
>others, right?), not just 888 etc. Neil.
There aren't many obvious parallels in the phone arena. Other than 888, all
of the new area codes issued so far have simply taken over the existing
numbers in an existing area code, with the rules about who gets what number
entirely mechanical once the political process of drawing the boundary was
done. It's sort of like we decided that .EDU was too big and moved all of
the entries in the western half (with the line between east and west decided
after suitable haggling) of the U.S. into .TCH. This isn't much of a
parallel, since there's a hard limit to how many numbers you can put into an
area code, but no limit on domains.
In the case of 888, anyone who had an existing 800 number could reserve the
parallel 888 number, and something like 20% of the holders of 800 numbers
did so. (Heck, I did, it was free.) They still haven't come up with a plan
to allocate or release the reserved 888 numbers, and it doesn't sound like
there will be one anytime soon. The plans I've heard are along the lines of
per-number auctions, with a $100 minimum bid to claim an uncontested
number. Had I been thinking more clearly, since my 800 numbers are not
particularly famous, I'd just have requested the matching 888 numbers and
routed them to the same place.
The main thing this suggests is that if you open a new domain that's parallel
to an existing domain, some fraction of the old domain's holders will rush
to claim their matching names, and if you don't give the existing holders a
right to reserve the names, you'll have a couple of months of extremely
exciting domain speculating, poaching, and sueing.
We can certainly assume that the holders of reasonably well known names on
and off the net will use their muscle to grab their names. This doesn't
have much bearing on how shared TLDs would work except to suggest that in
practice we'll need a duplicate reservation process before the domain opens.
After that, like 800/888 numbers, it's first come first served.
- --
John R. Levine, IECC, POB 640 Trumansburg NY 14886 +1 607 387 6869
johnl@iecc.com "Space aliens are stealing American jobs." - Stanford econ prof
----------------------------------------------------------------------
Date: 2 Aug 1996 15:48:07 -0700
From: Kent Crispin
Subject: Re: Lightweight vs. heavyweight registries
Neil Readwin allegedly said:
>
> > The "coordination database". In simplest form, this is just a
> > database of all (subdomain_name,responsible_registry) pairs in use.
>
> It is not clear to me that this database has to exist. Let's consider
> an alternative transaction:
>
> Customer C walks into registry R and says "Here's some money,
> get foo.bar delegated to the host at IP address a.b.c.d"
>
> Registry R updates the "nameserver database"
>
> C and R part forever.
>
> This would move the concurrency problems to the registry and nameserver
> DBs (I'm not claiming that this is a good thing).
I agree -- it might not have to exist as a separate DB. I was making
trying to identify the databases by function, sort of.
> An aside - if the coordination DB does exist then "whois" starts to
> look more like DNS itself - to find the contact info etc you would have
> to query the coordination DB to find the registry, just as you now
> query the root servers to find the NS for a second level domain. Is it
> desireable to have this data distributed?
Good question. It could be, for example, that mafia.com wants a
great deal of secrecy, and makes use of the "Your Secrets Are Safe"
registry, which uses a bunch of fancy encryption techniques to
provide anonymous access to the administrative contact -- I'm going
off the deep end, aren't I? :-)
> > Once a month all the cohorts do a full rebuild of the nameserver
> > database by pooling the information from their registry databases.
>
> I know this isn't fair, but this sounds a lot like "The incremental
> update scheme will obviously break, so here's a kludge to repair the
> damage from time to time." I think I have a better kludge :-)
Yep, that's exactly what it was :-)
> Since the DB will usually be small (a few megabytes or tens of
> megabytes) it shouldn't be that hard to generate a simple checksum of
> it and have the registries compare that after each incremental update
> (assuming they care whether they are right, that is). Neil.
They will certainly care, because their customers will care. That's
one of the reasons I am not too concerned about this particular part
of the problem -- it seems like that are lots of "natural" forces
that will make it work correctly.
- --
Kent Crispin "No reason to get excited",
kent@songbird.com the thief he kindly spoke...
----------------------------------------------------------------------
Date: 2 Aug 1996 15:52:11 -0700
From: Kent Crispin
Subject: Re: Charter
Neil Readwin allegedly said:
>
> > it is especially important that there be mechanisms in place to prevent
> > cheating, pre-claiming desirable names, and so on.
>
> Anyone else can still pre-claim names by paying the registries to do it
> for them, so why shouldn't the registries be allowed to do it too :-)
> The registries only have an advantage over random end-users at the
> moment the TLD is first opened, and my feeling is that it actually
> won't be that big a deal.
You are probably right. Cheating would be hard to defeat, and it
mmight be better handled by (shudder) litigation between competing
registries. Basically, the IANA could just make a definition of
cheating (assigning names without a valid IP address behind the) part
of the license contract, and let the registries enforce the rules
against each other...
> Anyone know about precedents wrt phone numbers? The same problem
> should occur with any new area code (some numbers are better than
> others, right?), not just 888 etc. Neil.
Seems to me I heard something about companies grabbing numbers, but
it wasn't a serious enough problem to be any kind of show-stopper...
- --
Kent Crispin "No reason to get excited",
kent@songbird.com the thief he kindly spoke...
----------------------------------------------------------------------
Date: 2 Aug 1996 15:58:52 -0700
From: Michael Dillon
Subject: Re: Lightweight vs. heavyweight registries
On Fri, 2 Aug 1996, Kent Crispin wrote:
> Let's suppose, for discussion purposes, that responsibility for
> supplying an accurate zone file is rotated around the cohorts (say
> once a month), and that once a night all the cohorts mail their zone
> file updates to the designated maintainer of the month. They use a
There is a major, major problem with your proposal and it will never work
because of that.
We have no WG charter, thus we have no WG, thus we have no possibility
of setting an Internet standard, thus we are wasting our time.
1. set requirements
2. design
3. code
Let's not jump straight into coding, shall we? Is anybody serious about
developping a standard set of registry protocols, or is this just going to
be another gabfest?
Michael Dillon - ISP & Internet Consulting
Memra Software Inc. - Fax: +1-604-546-3049
http://www.memra.com - E-mail: michael@memra.com
----------------------------------------------------------------------
Date: 2 Aug 1996 16:10:39 -0700
From: johnl@iecc.com (John R Levine)
Subject: Re: Lightweight vs. heavyweight registries
>This is the good part about competition -- if Bogo-net was incompetent,
>then presumabley they won't remain in the business for long. :-)
Ah, but what business? I'm expecting that the many if not most of these
outfits will be ISPs who are doing registry as a sideline to support their
customers, so they don't care all that much about the registry business. I
also fear a "tragedy of the commons" in which each registry figures that
even if he screws up, the next guy in line will straighten things out. (If
you think I'm being unduly cynical, let me tell you true stories about PBX
owners who refused to update their PBXes when the first non-traditional area
codes came out, claiming that nobody needed to talk to rural Washington and
Alabama anyway.)
It's also easy to imagine a situation where one of the registries feels
aggrieved about something and holds the whole process hostage when it's his
turn to do the domain merge. A jointly owned Swiss non-profit, like the
ones they've been talking about in newdom, with no axes of its own to grind
sure would be nice.
>About the "centralized registry" vs other models -- any part of the
>operation of STLD registries could be subcontracted in various ways --
>actual TLD DNS nameservers, for example could be totally separate from
>the registries, and just be in a contractual relationship to receive
>updated zone files. Also, there could be contractual links between
>the various registries, some of them could be part of a chain ("Domain
>Names R Us") and so on. In general, I would like to leave those
>relationships as unspecified as possible, to leave as much
>organizational freedom as possible.
No argument there, except that I'm pushing everything down a level. I'd like
to define well specified protocols about how the first level customers talk
to a centralized light-weight registry for a shared TLD. Below that,
anything goes.
>I guess another wrinkle is that a registry could serve several TLDs.
I've been presuming that for the most part all customer registries will sign
up to serve every TLD they can, which is why it'd be nice to have a common
way for the customers to talk to the light-weight registries.
- --
John R. Levine, IECC, POB 640 Trumansburg NY 14886 +1 607 387 6869
johnl@iecc.com "Space aliens are stealing American jobs." - Stanford econ prof
----------------------------------------------------------------------
Date: 2 Aug 1996 16:32:04 -0700
From: perry@piermont.com
Subject: Re: Lightweight vs. heavyweight registries
Michael Dillon writes:
> There is a major, major problem with your proposal and it will never work
> because of that.
>
> We have no WG charter, thus we have no WG, thus we have no possibility
> of setting an Internet standard, thus we are wasting our time.
Get off it. Producing a WG charter takes about half an hour. I've done
a couple at this point. Its hardly difficult. Just sit down and write
one if you feel like it.
Perry
----------------------------------------------------------------------
Date: 2 Aug 1996 16:39:20 -0700
From: Michael Dillon
Subject: WG charter timeline
Somewhere in the STLD WG charter there will be a milestone that says
something like this:
MMM yy - publish Internet Draft for STLD protocols
Right after that I would like to se something like this:
- the .SHARED TLD will be established for the purposes of
verifying the operational soundness of the STLD protocols.
This TLD will exist for only 6 months and all domains in
.SHARED will be paid for using an electronic scrip with
no monetary value. At the end of the six months all
.SHARED domains will cease to exist. The intent is only
to test and refine protocols including the billing and
payment procedures.
Michael Dillon - ISP & Internet Consulting
Memra Software Inc. - Fax: +1-604-546-3049
http://www.memra.com - E-mail: michael@memra.com
----------------------------------------------------------------------
Date: 2 Aug 1996 17:02:03 -0700
From: Michael Dillon
Subject: Re: Lightweight vs. heavyweight registries
On Fri, 2 Aug 1996, Perry E. Metzger wrote:
>
> Michael Dillon writes:
> > There is a major, major problem with your proposal and it will never work
> > because of that.
> >
> > We have no WG charter, thus we have no WG, thus we have no possibility
> > of setting an Internet standard, thus we are wasting our time.
>
> Get off it. Producing a WG charter takes about half an hour. I've done
> a couple at this point. Its hardly difficult. Just sit down and write
> one if you feel like it.
That's the whole point. It takes a half hour and a couple of days
bouncing the text around the list. But nobody is doing it!!! Why?
I tried to do this with the NEWDOM list but it didn't seem to get
anywhere. This time it's somebody else's turn and the only way it will fly
is if most of the people on this list support the writing of a charter and
support the WG that results from it.
Michael Dillon - ISP & Internet Consulting
Memra Software Inc. - Fax: +1-604-546-3049
http://www.memra.com - E-mail: michael@memra.com
----------------------------------------------------------------------
Date: 2 Aug 1996 17:03:18 -0700
From: Kent Crispin
Subject: Re: WG charter timeline
Michael Dillon allegedly said:
>
>
> Somewhere in the STLD WG charter there will be a milestone that says
> something like this:
>
> MMM yy - publish Internet Draft for STLD protocols
>
> Right after that I would like to se something like this:
>
> - the .SHARED TLD will be established for the purposes of
> verifying the operational soundness of the STLD protocols.
> This TLD will exist for only 6 months and all domains in
> .SHARED will be paid for using an electronic scrip with
> no monetary value. At the end of the six months all
> .SHARED domains will cease to exist. The intent is only
> to test and refine protocols including the billing and
> payment procedures.
OK. Here's a draft:
- -----------------------------------------------------------------
Shared Top Level Domains Working Group (STLDWG) Charter
Chair(s)
o TBD
o (Someone from IANA?)
Internet Area Director(s)
o TBD
Mailing List Information
o General Discussion: shared-tld@higgs.net
o To Subscribe: shared-tld-request@higgs.net
o Archive: ?????????????????????????
Description of Working Group
The Shared Top Level Domains Working Group is concerned with the
technical and logistic requirements of creating shared domain name
registration databases, and the administration of delegated top level
domains by multiple domain name registries.
The primary products of this WG are three: First the STLD Draft, and
second, a test implemtation of the ideas using the .SHARED TLD as a
test, and three, a revised STLD draft incorporating the lessons from
the experiment, which should become an RFC
The areas of concern include
o fostering an appropriate blend of competition and
cooperation between cohort registries
o the relationship between STLD registries and name servers
o technical issues regarding management of the various
distribute databases
o the adminstrative procedures involved in running
a registry serving a Shared TLD
o etc... [help!!!]
Goals and Milestones
Mar 1997
Submit Shared Top Level Domain Draft
Mar 1997
Establishment of the .SHARED TLD for purposes of testing
STLD proposals.
Jun 1997
STLD RFC
- --
Kent Crispin "No reason to get excited",
kent@songbird.com the thief he kindly spoke...
----------------------------------------------------------------------
Date: 2 Aug 1996 17:05:34 -0700
From: Kent Crispin
Subject: Re: Lightweight vs. heavyweight registries
Perry E. Metzger allegedly said:
>
>
> Michael Dillon writes:
> > There is a major, major problem with your proposal and it will never work
> > because of that.
> >
> > We have no WG charter, thus we have no WG, thus we have no possibility
> > of setting an Internet standard, thus we are wasting our time.
>
> Get off it. Producing a WG charter takes about half an hour. I've done
> a couple at this point. Its hardly difficult. Just sit down and write
> one if you feel like it.
>
> Perry
I just sent one around. Since I haven't done one before, I would
appreciate your careful attention :-)
- --
Kent Crispin "No reason to get excited",
kent@songbird.com the thief he kindly spoke...
----------------------------------------------------------------------
Date: 2 Aug 1996 17:08:35 -0700
From: Kent Crispin
Subject: Re: Lightweight vs. heavyweight registries
Michael Dillon allegedly said:
>
[snip]
>
> I tried to do this with the NEWDOM list but it didn't seem to get
> anywhere. This time it's somebody else's turn and the only way it will fly
> is if most of the people on this list support the writing of a charter and
> support the WG that results from it.
I just sent one around, and I anxiously await your input :-)
- --
Kent Crispin "No reason to get excited",
kent@songbird.com the thief he kindly spoke...
----------------------------------------------------------------------
Date: 2 Aug 1996 17:11:01 -0700
From: chris@kosh.punk.net (Christopher Ambler)
Subject: Re: WG charter timeline
I like the draft, though I wonder if March97 isn't a little pessimistic.
I would shoot for 1 January 97 myself.
Christopher Ambler
----------------------------------------------------------------------
Date: 2 Aug 1996 17:20:44 -0700
From: nreadwin@london.micrognosis.com (Neil Readwin)
Subject: Who is archiving the shared-tld list?
Is anyone archiving the list? I cannot find a pointer to an archive
on the Web pages. Neil.
----------------------------------------------------------------------
Date: 2 Aug 1996 17:27:18 -0700
From: Michael Dillon
Subject: Re: WG charter timeline
On Fri, 2 Aug 1996, Kent Crispin wrote:
> Mar 1997
> Submit Shared Top Level Domain Draft
This isn't really complex stuff here. I think this should be Oct 1996.
> Mar 1997
> Establishment of the .SHARED TLD for purposes of testing
> STLD proposals.
Oct 1996
> Jun 1997
> STLD RFC
Apr 1997
Michael Dillon - ISP & Internet Consulting
Memra Software Inc. - Fax: +1-604-546-3049
http://www.memra.com - E-mail: michael@memra.com
