Re: Limiting the number of registrars and gTLDs

[Alan Sullivan <sully@frontiernet.net>]

Dave Crocker wrote:
> 
> At 12:08 PM -0800 12/22/96, Jeff Williams wrote:
> >  I agree with Chris's statment here.  I think that if there are reasons
> >to limit the nucmer, than those reasons must be discussed, established,
> 
>         There are some concerns which pertain to trademark protection. I'm
> neither a trademark attorney nor trained in the topic, so I can't comment
> on those issues.
> 
>         The other concerns are operational.  These I DO know something about:
> 
>         The Internet has quite a bit of experience designing, building,
> deploying and using large-scale systems.  One might debate whether it's
> history is the longest or largest, for multi-organization data
> communications, but whatever its ranking, the experience *is* considerable.
> 
>         Some people approach the task of designing a large-scale, long-term
> system as one of extremely careful design, ironing out on paper ever
> concern that appears.  There are times that this approach is necessary.  A
> mission to Mars has limited ability to make system corrections after the
> rockets fire.  And I am not too thrilled at the idea of having a pacemaker
> need debugging after it's installed.
> 
>         But in the world of Internet technology and service, the usual
> approach is to consider large-scale, long-term issues as best one can, but
> design for near-term use and deliver something useful sooner, not later.
> Large scale and long term factor into the design, but it is not expected
> that all those issues will be resolved in the initial design.  The reason
> is that few such designs ever work.  In reality, we learn from our use of
> systems and we then have to modify them.  No matter how good our initial
> design efforts, we need to make changes as we use the system.
> 
>         That leads to keeping designs simple and deploying them quickly.
> As we gain experience, we splice in enhancements.  It has happened to
> pretty much every portion of Internet technology and service.  Recent
> examples include SNMP bulk data transfer, HTTP and SMTP streaming
> (different mechanisms but both are performance-related), MIME content-type
> name partitioning (vnd. & prs.).  Older examples include IP addresses,
> which went from flat, to 3 types of network field length (Class A/B/C) to
> arbitrary lengths with sub-fields (CIDR), and TCP transmission timeouts and
> backoffs, which went through massive improvement after TEN YEARS of use,
> due to learning more about the dynamics of large-network variances.
> 
>         Well, guess what.  The current topic also involves issues in
> scaling.  How do we implement large-scale, multi-administration management
> of gTLDs?  The answer is that we design the best scheme we think
> appropriate for the long term, but we deploy it slowly, in this case
> limiting the number of gTLDs and the number of registrars, and then we
> watch how things go.  Increases occur as experience is gained.  Changes
> occur as experience is gained.  This, I'm afraid, is the only responsible
> approach.
> 
>         Anything else would be irresponsible.  To assume that things will
> work perfectly from the start is not reasonable.  To assume that it is easy
> to change large numbers of operations quickly is not reasonable.  The
> larger the number of players, the longer it takes to make changes.  It's
> that simple.
> 
> d/
> 
> (read the last line, please)
> ----------------------------
> Dave Crocker, Director                                       +1 408 246 8253
> Internet Mail Consortium                                 (f) +1 408 249 6205
> 127 Segré Place                                             dcrocker@imc.org
> Santa Cruz, CA  95060 USA                                 http://www.imc.org
> 
> Also:  IAHC member, expressing strictly (or loosely) personal opinions
Hi Dave,
Correct me here if I am wrong - but I believe your thesis is: "The
reason 
you want to limit the number of gTLDs is because you want to deploy a
shared registry 
scheme slowly - so that the distributed system known as Internet will
adapt to it over time."

This is fine - if one were to assume that shared registries are a GOOD
THING. There are 
numerous comments that have indicated the problems of this approach.
Apparently IAHC has
decided to go in a direction orthogonal to Draft Postel. Let's hear the
merits of a shared
registry - I can be pursuaded - I just haven't heard strong arguments
FOR a shared registry.
In fact why don't we try another experiment - let ALL QUALIFIED
registries run their own 
exclusive gTLDs - no change to structure - no radical changes - except
for increase 
competition to NSI. 

Thanks,
Alan 

-- 
Alan Sullivan
President
Top Domain Registry Inc.