TELECOM Digest OnLine - Sorted: Re: United States Says No! Internet is Ours!

Re: United States Says No! Internet is Ours!

John Levine (johnl@iecc.com)
7 Oct 2005 15:10:31 -0000

> Am I the only one who is ROFLMAO about this? There is nothing
> preventing other nations and/or organizations from setting up their
> own root servers. It amazes me how much press this issue has gotten
> recently.

Well, two things standing in the way are money and expertise. Running
a real root server, as opposed to a toy one that only you and your
twelve best friends use, is a a significant operational challenge. I
gather a typical root costs about a million bucks a year.

The other reason that nobody sets up new roots is that there is no
actual reason to do so. For all that ICANN does a lousy job, the
roots work fine and nobody other than a few get rich quick artists and
foolish idealists want root domains other than the ones there already.

Of the new domains that have entered the roots in the past few years,
the only ones with enough registrations to be a financial success are
.INFO and .BIZ, cynical clones of .COM used almost entirely by people
whose information you don't want and with whom you do not want to do
business. The .NAME domain, intended for personal domains, has a
modest number of registrants, largely in Europe, but I see them
loosening up their registration rules which tells me that they're
scrambling for registration dollars. The rest, .MUSEUM, .AERO, .COOP,
and .PRO are failures used by almost nobody. The three new ones
.JOBS, .TRAVEL, and .MOBI haven't been around long enough to fail, but
there's no reason to expect them to be any different.

R's,

John

Post Followup Article Use your browser's quoting feature to quote article into reply
Go to Next message: Steve Sobol: "Re: United States Says No! Internet is Ours!"
Go to Previous message: Tony P.: "Re: United States Says No! Internet is Ours!"
May be in reply to: Bradley S. Klapper: "United States Says No! Internet is Ours!"
Next in thread: Steve Sobol: "Re: United States Says No! Internet is Ours!"
TELECOM Digest: Home Page