[LINK] 'Shake-up' for internet proposed by ICANN

[Glen Turner]

Kim Holburn wrote:

> It's a massive increase in the geography of the real estate of the  
> internet
> Dr Paul Twomey, Icann

And a massive amount of short term cash to ICANN and registrars.

The cost will fall on the operators of DNS root name servers,
since this proposal widens the base of the DNS tree, and thus
increases the amount of traffic seen at the root servers.

The root servers are already under incredible load, since a
great many typographical errors find their way up to the root
(imagine spelling .aus rather than .au, it takes a root server
to say that this does not exist).  "Opening up" the top level
will result in a great deal more traffic, both correct (and
thus cachable) and typo (often unique, and thus no in the
caches held further down the tree).

You'd think some of that short-term cash would be going to
subsidise the cost of root name servers, but no.


Registrars have been very good at avoiding costs. For example,
the cost of DNSSEC falls mainly upon them. DNSSEC offers
a great deal of security against phishing to users, and
the technical community (ie, IETF DNS WG) have wanted it
deployed for years. But the registrars seem to have convinced
ICANN against doing this, despite the benefit to net users.


The same is broadly true of Australia itself. AuDA's strategic
plan has no plan for implementing DNSSEC, nor for modifying
its policies and procedures to allow any portion of AuDA's
namespace to do that.

-- 
  Glen Turner