Breaking the rules is too dangerous. Don't let it continue.

[Andrey V Stolyarov <crocodil@xxxxxxxxx>]

I've already sent one message to this address earlier, but for
now I've got some additional comments. Many people here,
including mr. Lesnikov (known as a one of top RosNIIROS
officers), propose to make some "special" decisions regarding .SU
basing on its current activeness, historical role etc.  Mr.
Lesnikov even proposes to establish a new kind of TLD, named
"historical TLD".

Every technical person who knows DNS basics should realize that
each additional name within the root zone means additional load
to _ALL_ the existing DNS servers because of having to hold
several additional records in the cache. Definitely this reduces
the load of the servers of SLDs a bit, but their load is not too
serious now.

 From the other hand, there are thousands of companies and persons
who would love to make some money from another TLD, as
administering a TLD is one of the most efficient and easy money
makers I ever heard of. This type of activity has no use for
Internet Community, it only provides "pretty" domain names for
some (strange) people, money for another people and additional
load of DNS servers for the rest of the Internet.

Thus, the mission of ICANN, as I see it, must be to prevent the
root DNS zone from uncontrolled growing, and until now, this task
is acceptably solved. One of the keys to this is following some
certain transparent rules and policies which don't serve any
particular commerical interests.

The policy for two-letter TLDs is now that they all must be
ccTLDs and must comply to ISO3166. Some people claim this policy
should be changed (or an exception in the policy should be made)
just because they don't want .SU to be destroyed. Let's see
however what results can follow.

One of the possible difficulties is mentioned in the discussed
paper: "SU" can be assigned by ISO comitee to some other country
or territory, and then there will be a real disaster. However,
let's even imagine that such (particular) assignment is
impossible, just to focus on more important circumstances.

First of all, we live in the world of equal rights. What is
allowed to one, that must be allowed to everyone. So, if you
agree not to remove one obsoleted domain, you can be absolutely
sure you'll never manage to remove any obsoleted domain in the
future again. That is, in case any country renames, unites with
other, separates down to independent parts etc., ICANN will have
to assign a new domain in accordance to the policy, but
definitely will be unable to remove the obsoleted one. In
particular, forget about retiring .TP in this case.

Furthermore, some of countries which already agreed to drop their
obsoleted domains (such as CS and ZR) can demand to return
"their" domains back, arguing they've got the same rights as
Russia and East Timor.

This could be taken not too serious because such political
cataclisms don't happen too often. However, don't forget there
are lots of very little countries such as Tuvalu and Butan. For
such countries, ccTLD can be a valuable source of funding; so, I
won't be surprized if their governments (or what do they have
instead of one) decides to rename the country just to get another
TLD. It is expensive to rename a major country, but renaming such
a little one can be cheap enough, even many times cheaper than to
negotiate another sTLD with ICANN. They could get lots of TLDs
this way, and needless to say they'll never agree to return any
of them (because they've got the same rights as the others).

Such a practice could make the system of ccTLDs totally unable to
follow ISO3166 and produce total chaos in the root DNS zone.
ICANN or any other authority will have then no arguments against
opening the root zone for private registrations of TLDs, and then
the system known as DNS will just cease to exist.

Responsibly realizing difficulties of pending action of removing
an active and promoted TLD, I however humbly ask ICANN not to
make any exceptions or changes to the existing ccTLD policy, as
we can end up with a total catastrophe if you do so.


Thanks for your attention.


--
Andrey V. Stolyarov