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2012-06-28-RootZone
GAC Advice
2012-06-28-RootZone
N/A
Consensus met
2012-06-28-RootZone
Communication
- 2. Root Zone Scaling
- The GAC welcomes the draft report on Impact on Root Server Operations and Provisioning Due to New gTLDs' and exchanged initial views on it with the board. The GAC expressed its concern that the processes and decision taking procedures to slow down, stop and adjust the pace of insertions of TLD strings in the root in case of detected anomalies in the root system, including its harmonized metrics, mechanisms and chain of command, are not yet defined.
- The GAC also looks forward to the publication of more comprehensive data for external review as planned.
The GAC advises the Board
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- to take this up in advance of the delegation of any new gTLDs.
Communication
- 2. Root Zone Scaling
- The GAC welcomes the draft report on Impact on Root Server Operations and Provisioning Due to New gTLDs' and exchanged initial views on it with the board. The GAC expressed its concern that the processes and decision taking procedures to slow down, stop and adjust the pace of insertions of TLD strings in the root in case of detected anomalies in the root system, including its harmonized metrics, mechanisms and chain of command, are not yet defined.
- The GAC also looks forward to the publication of more comprehensive data for external review as planned.
The GAC advises the Board
-
- to take this up in advance of the delegation of any new gTLDs.
GAC Acknowledgement of Register Entry
27 July 2012
Next Steps/Required Action
ICANN to publish further comprehensive reports.
Responsible Party
ICANN Board
Current Status/Communications Log
7 December 2012:
ICANN published 'Root Zone Scaling Measurements at L-Root' on 7 December 2012 : https://www.icann.org/en/news/announcements/announcement-3-07dec12-en.htm
Board-Response-to-GAC-Prague-Communique_20121013.pdf
The ICANN Board thanks the GAC for its advice on the draft report on 'Impact on Root Server Operations and Provisioning due to New gTLDs.' ICANN notes the GAC’s concern that the processes and procedures are not yet defined to slow down, stop and adjust the pace of insertions of TLD strings in the root. ICANN, NTIA, and Verisign do and have had an emergency response process for many years.
An existing process has been used to reverse, stop and adjust changes to the root zone on an emergency basis and is triggered by existing TLD operators. A new process will be defined to accommodate slowing down, halting, or reversing entries in the root zone in the case of detected anomalies in the root system.
ICANN supports the effort within RSSAC to define a common set of quantitative measurements to be collected from all root servers.
In the interim as RSSAC defines the common measurements to be collected, ICANN will be collecting relevant data specific to L-Root and will publish that data such that trends correlating to the delegation of new gTLDs can be identified by ICANN and by the general public.
Systems and processes to achieve the collection and publication of this data will be deployed before January 2013. Confirmation of the precise measurements to be made will be published before November 2012.
The root zone scaling reports that have been shared to date include:
1) Root Zone Augmentation and Impact Analysis conducted by the independent DNS Operations and Research Center (DNS-OARC) in 2009. The report’s conclusion was that the deployed software was capable of handling at least 100,000 top-level domains before there was potential degradation in response times.
2) Report on the Impact on the DNS Root System of Increasing the Size and Volatility of the Root Zone was written in 2009 by a specially convened “Root Server Scaling Team comprised of experts from the RSSAC, SSAC, and experts from outside the ICANN community.
3) Analysis of Root Zone Decay, published in 2012, concludes that TLDs have high resiliency with aged data. The vast majority of the 314 TLDs in existence at the time of the analysis would continue to function effectively from the perspective of end users, even with stale Root Zone data.
4) Quantitative Analysis of Root Zone Growth compared twelve-year period of root zone data and created a model for extrapolating root zone size in the future. This report is Appendix E of “Impact on Root Server Operations and Provisioning Due to New gTLDs”. Under the model, with a projected 1,000 new gTLDs added per year from 2013, the size of the root zone is expected to increase to a size of over 2.5 megabytes by 2016 from its current size of around 200 kilobytes. This root zone size is comparatively small considering the size of files that modern computers can accommodate.
These reports, as well as 'Impact on Root Server Operations and Provisioning due to New gTLDs', and the related data are made available for your external review.