Re: Second level domains for individuals
There is a hot debate in Hungary. Some peoples want me to start registering second level domains for individuals.
Arbitrary individuals ? The debate will become even hotter as soon as you start to implement such plan. Perhaps so hot as to cause a partial meltdown of the internet as we know it. Look at what happened to the *.com domain. Even most knowledgable and repectable people did not foresee that this would grow out-of-hand so soon as it does now. Registering individuals in one single domain constitutes essentially one enormous flat namespace. The DNS was designed to avoid just that, both for technical and administrative reasons.
From a technical view, I am not convinced that the DNS will be able to gracefully handle domains with, say, a million entries. Not an extraordinary number in the long run for a big country.
But presumably the administrative burden will be overwhelming. Compare this with administration in real life, be it civil registration, telephone directories, you name it. All has been organized in a distributed matter of some sort, e.g. geographically. Apparently that's the way to survive. Think about arbitration of names. A first-come first-serve policy would be totally unrealistic. Strong naming conventions would have to be designed. This may be impossible to enforce. You really have to think beyond current experiments with a few hundred individuals, and anticipate what can happen when this becomes common practice. Having individuals registered in one single domain, *any* domain, does not look a good idea. In case that domain were a top-level domain, it looks like disaster. -- Eric Wassenaar
[Note ripe-op@ripe.net deleted from CCs] I strongly support Eric Wassenaar's comment about the dangers of creating too large domains. It is a problem for DNS technology. It is a problem for registration/administration. Think about the situation a few years down the road: IT DOES NOT SCALE. DO NOT DO IT! The alternatives: 1) Do not register individuals. This is only temporary relief but it may last a few years. 2) Register individuals in geographic subdomains, approaching postal addresses. 3) Register individuals in arbitrary subdomains. One scheme proposed was something like name.123456.indiv.nn where 123456 is an arbitrarily chosen domain name. Anyone can register a number and start providing registration services to individuals. The number space is quite large such that there can be as many of these registries as one could concievably want. Robert Elz <kre@munnari.OZ.AU> wrote a quite elaborate proposal for something like this back in Oct 94. I do not know the extent to which it has been a success but people might want to look at the id.au domain. My personal opinion is 1) Never register individuals under a TLD. 2) If you want to register individuals, choose between 2 and 3 above. Daniel
I strongly support Eric Wassenaar's comment about the dangers of creating too large domains. That's the reason why, whenever possible, we force the creation of a "parent domain" or to register under such a domain instead of directly under .NL. A good example is Philips: it has quite a large number of independent or more or less independent subsidiaries in the Netherlands. But we don't allow any of them to register a domain under .NL; we force them to register under the philips.nl domain. Piet
Date: Fri, 10 Nov 1995 09:46:46 +0100 From: Daniel Karrenberg <Daniel.Karrenberg@ripe.net> Message-ID: <9511100846.AA11630@ncc.ripe.net> 1) Do not register individuals. This is only temporary relief but it may last a few years. That doesn't work either, the individuals just pretend to be businesses. 2) Register individuals in geographic subdomains, approaching postal addresses. This would work if you could convince the people that the domain registration just says something about how they registered, and nothing about them as they exist. While this is certainly true, technically, in people's minds it isn't, they seem to believe that if their domain name is foo.melb.vic.au and they move to Sydney they have to change domain names. That's not a good impression to leave (apart from causing them to unnecessarily change their domain name, it also adds to registry work for no particular good purpose). 3) Register individuals in arbitrary subdomains. One scheme proposed was something like Robert Elz <kre@munnari.OZ.AU> wrote a quite elaborate proposal for something like this back in Oct 94. I do not know the extent to which it has been a success but people might want to look at the id.au domain. Its actually still just starting. That's mostly due to my laziness (or how busy I am, or however you like to phrase it). That is, at each step along the way of setting it up, I inserted an arbitrary delay of about 4-5 months... It is mostly running now though, and seems OK, though as yet we have not a lot of registrations. For those who don't know of it, the arbitrary string in our case is currently a label that refers to some Australian flora or fauna - however we can use anything as the need arises. For us, one level is enough, we're pretty sure that 10000 entries in a domain is manageable, that means we could have 10000 domains each with 10000 individuals, which is, I think 100 million, which is just plenty for Australia for a very long time. My personal opinion is 1) Never register individuals under a TLD. I agree totally - in fact, my personal opinion is to only register (large) classes in a TLD, that is, all end user domains are at least 3 levels. I know that many Eurpoean contry registries don't agree however. kre
1) Do not register individuals. This is only temporary relief but it may last a few years. That doesn't work either, the individuals just pretend to be businesses. They can't, when [evidence of] Chamber of Commerce registration is required, as is the case for .NL. And since CoC registration costs money and has a couple of legal and tax implications, it serves as a good showstopper in many cases. Piet
Daniel asked me to let you all know how to find the ID.AU policy (note, this is a policy for allocation of, and maintenance of, sub-domains of ID.AU, not for their internal registration guidelines). I have made it available by anonymous FTP host: munnari.OZ.AU file: netinfo/ID.AU-policy (simple ascii text) Or: <ftp://munnari.oz.au/netinfo/ID.AU-policy> The "-policy" stuck on the end is just to prevent weird WWW browsers from assuming that any file that ends ".au" is audio and attempting to play the thing through speakers... kre
participants (5)
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Daniel Karrenberg -
e07＠nikhef.nl -
Piet Beertema -
Robert Elz -
Robert Elz