Subject: Re: [Ietf] New .mobi, .xxx, ... TLDs?

From: Dean Anderson <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 22 Apr 2004 14:48:47 -0400 (EDT)

On Thu, 22 Apr 2004, Joe Touch wrote:

> The "tel:" part is sufficient to get you to VOIP - in fact, that's what 
> tel: ought to mean -- no more, no less. If you want IBM to differentiate 
> the switchboard from the headquarters, try:
> 
> 	tel://ibm.com/hq	- headquarters-specific
> 	tel://ibm.com/		- default switchboard
> 
> > Similarly, I'd expect that tel://ibm.mobi gets me to the IBM Cellular
> > switchboard.
> 
> 	tel://ibm.com/cell
> 
> I.e., that's a decision IBM gets to make; others can decide, e.g., that 
> cell and regular calls all go through the same VOIP gateway.

Well, why not just run everything over http and have an application-type 
header to destinguish the different formats?  Possible, but not quite 
ideal, since then you are stuck with an HTTP server in the middle.

> > I recall that gte internetworking used gte.com for internal corporate
> > addresses and gte.net for customer addresses. Some companies use
> > subdomains for such purposes.  
> 
> Sure, but that is different than the above. In the tel: cases, all the 
> addresses are for internal corporate, not for a service IBM runs for its 
> customers.

Umm, I don't see how. Its just using naming, and specifically different
TLD's to make a distinction between corporate and customer functions.  No
matter what you do, you are probably going to use naming anyway, either as
a url path component, or as a subdomain, or as a new TLD.

I don't see any significant operational difference(*), nor any
particularly significant technical differences to them.  Except, I'd
probably prefer not to send everything through http, so that tends to go
against the use of url pathnames and application-types as discriminators.

What difference does it make to the IETF whether there are more TLD's or
less?

(*) Having more TLD's ought to improve the reliability of the internet in
general by distributing load off the overused com and net domain servers.  
Whether you have 259 TLDs or 2500 isn't going to make a great deal of
difference to the root servers, as these aren't particularly large zones.  
2500 TLDs would no doubt make some measurable impact on the roots, but it
would make a hugely big difference in directing traffic off the com and
net servers which have millions of entries.  And we aren't talking about
2500 TLDs, though. We are talking about just adding a handful. This isn't
a significant difference, and may not even be measurable.

On the other hand, I would also note that the com and net domains are
commercial, and charge fees for their operation. I don't see that the IETF
or ICANN necessarilly cares either way how much that operation costs, or
that it should be concerned very much with reducing those costs with more
TLD's.  But I'd also say that extreme disregard for costs would be a bad 
thing.  So I'd say that's a wash.

_______________________________________________
Ietf mailing list
[email-masked]
https://www1.ietf.org/mailman/listinfo/ietf

---

From: Dean Anderson <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 22 Apr 2004 14:48:47 -0400 (EDT)