3 ms·
Serious question here, what are the technical limitations in ditching gTLDs and allowing domain names to be any string?
by dreen 13y ago
Serious question here, what are the technical limitations in ditching gTLDs and allowing domain names to be any string?
- kodablah 13y agoSomeone has to have root servers that serve the children of the TLD...where would those be looked up? The closest you could do is assume a TLD (i.e. .com) if it's not typed, but then you harm the non-.com names. It needs to be a tree where roots are controlled.
- ryan-c 13y agoWe have this already. All TLDs are under the root domain, ".".
- ohashi 13y agoSomeone has to maintain a list.
- dreen 13y agoOK so the responses seem to boil down to this. My question is rather why that list cannot live in a globally distributed database inside thousands of DNS servers, everywhere, operated by ISPs and volunteers. Sort of like now but every server would have a near-complete list of all domains that have no syntax or schema. I guess the infrastructure costs would be higher, but what are other downsides? It definitely wouldn't be possible at the time of creation of DNS, but I can't see why it wouldn't be now.
- dec0dedab0de 13y agoThats exactly how it works now. http://www.iana.org/domains/root/files http://www.iana.org/domains/root/files
- dreen 13y agoIt doesnt because we have TLDs. Why is the hierarchy necessary? Why can't we have a one big list of strings matched with IP addresses?
- wmf 13y agoYou could start here http://www.icann.org/en/news/announcements/announcement-27jun12-en.htm http://www.icann.org/en/news/announcements/announcement-27ju...
- ryan-c 13y agogTLDs do allow you to have a domain name that is almost any string - I think the max length is 63 characters after punycode encoding, however it costs a lot of money.