In the second part 2 of a 5 part series of articles released by Verisign on its blog was written by Danny McPherson on the possible dangers of the impending rollout of the new gTLD program.
Basically this post chats about the DNS system, the root servers and the fact that the delegation of 1,000 new gTLD every year is a huge increase from what has been minimal growth over the years and urges ICANN to put into place an “early warning system …..to ensure that we have a well vetted “brakes” framework codified to be able to halt changes, rollback, and recover from any impacts that the delegation of new gTLD strings may illicit.”
Here is some highlights from the post:
“The DNS is on the cusp of expanding profoundly in places where it’s otherwise been stable for decades and absent some explicit action may do so in a very dangerous manner.”
“The DNS root server system, which serves a critical function in the stable operation of the Internet. Made up of 13 root servers operated by 12 different organizations, the root server system makes available the DNS’s root zone, which holds the lists of all domain names and addresses for the authoritative servers for all 317 existing top-level domains (TLDs), like .com, .net, .gov, .org, and .edu to name a few.
Every time an Internet user accesses information on the Internet, their application (e.g,. a web browser) talks to their local operating system (e.g., Windows) that works to resolve the name of the computer where the information resides to an Internet address in order to enable access to the information. I
f the Internet address that maps to the name isn’t known already, the program will ask domain name servers on the Internet where to find it. Those domain name servers start at the root, which is the authoritative source for the global DNS, and follow a series of delegations that proceed downward until they get the IP address that maps to the domain name they desire.
Only then can the application connect and obtain the information the user desires. And this all happens in a fraction of a second.
Even though the Internet has grown exponentially in the last decade, throughout this immense growth period the DNS root zone contents have been quite stable, with an average growth rate of less than 5 net new TLDs per year.…
