[ih] Funny how things work out

[John Levine]

In article <b6dae3ed-0aa5-62d1-79f7-e4e0f9a8599a at gmail.com> you write:
>Oddly enough, I only noticed today that .cern has been a TLD since 2014. I'm amazed they bothered.

Me too, seems like a poor use of $200K.  See their cute little list of 2LDs below.

>I just looked at the current state of the TLD registry. It's (IMNSHO) horrible. Counting up, there are the following numbers of TLDs of various types:
>Generic 1247, Sponsored 14, Country Code 316, Infrastructure 1.

Most of the generic ones are either vanity TLDs like .BANANAREPUBLIC
or failed attempts to take business from .COM. like .BLUE (13K names)
and .HOCKEY (1200 names.) Only a handful of new gTLDs have gotten as
many as a million entries, and those mostly seem to be Chinese fashion
statements. The three largest gTLDs are still COM with 150M, NET with 13M,
and ORG with 10M.  Some of larger ccTLDs might have 10M.

>Back in early 1998, the IAB wrote to Ira Magaziner in response to the Green Paper that led to ICANN. Among other things, we said "On the other hand, a very
>large increase in the total number of gTLDs (say to thousands) would lead us into technically unknown territory." Are we there yet?

The root server operators have no problem with the current size of the
root zone, and have much more of an issue with the vast number of
garbage queries that they get.

ICANN is of course barelling ahead to open another round of new TLDs,
even though the current round still has a few unresolved applications,
and there is basically no evidence that the current round has
benefited anyone other than domain speculators and the people who
provide the backend services for the vanity domains.

R's,
John

about.cern.
accelerators.cern.
againstcovid19.cern.
alice.cern.
alumni.cern.
antimatter.cern.
arts.cern.
at.cern.
atlas.cern.
beamlineforschools.cern.
beams.cern.
belgium.cern.
careers.cern.
cernandsocietyfoundation.cern.
cernvm.cern.
chis.cern.
clear.cern.
clic.cern.
cms.cern.
compass.cern.
computing.cern.
cosmicrays.cern.
darkmatter.cern.
education.cern.
engineering.cern.
europeanstrategy.cern.
exhibitions.cern.
experiments.cern.
flair.cern.
fluka.cern.
giving.cern.
globe.cern.
go.cern.
higgsboson.cern.
home.cern.
hse.cern.
ideasquare.cern.
incident.cern.
isolde.cern.
jobs.cern.
knowledge.cern.
kt.cern.
learn.cern.
lhc.cern.
library.cern.
medicis.cern.
neighbours.cern.
news.cern.
newsroom.cern.
nic.cern.
opendays.cern.
openlab.cern.
particles.cern.
physics.cern.
press.cern.
quantum.cern.
root.cern.
science.cern.
sciencegateway.cern.
scientific-info.cern.
sis.cern.
sparks.cern.
standardmodel.cern.
supersymmetry.cern.
teachers.cern.
technology.cern.
test-home.cern.
testing1.cern.
theory.cern.
united-states.cern.
visit.cern.
voisins.cern.
webfest.cern.
winservices.cern.
www.cern.