At the public forum, Elliot Noss (CEO of Tucows) brought up a controvisal topic of new gTLDs – Vint’s commented that DNS is designed to be hierarchical in nature and hence not able to support large number of TLDs.
To be exact, Vint is technically correct. And it is also true that we might have problems if we have large numbers of TLDs, creating a flat naming hierarchy and hence creating dependency on the (only) 13 root servers. However, such arguments are no long valid – we actually have more then 13 physical root servers, all scattered around the world via share-any-cast. Over 40 root-servers to be more exact and potentially as many as we want. So load-wise, we certainly don’t have problems supporting more TLDs then say 2 years ago.
What we don’t know is how many TLDs can we support now…nor do we know a way to accurately predict that. But my guess is 100,000 TLDs without a sweat.
The trend is that we already going flat. Restricting flatness in the TLDs means we get flatness in 2LD. (See related news on Verisign getting 5.1m new registration in last quarter.) We have over 66M zones under .com and .net and here we are arguing over a few TLDs?
While I don’t subscribe to Elliot free-for-all regime on TLDs, I think we can be more liberal with new TLDs.
