New DNS Top Level Domains

If you follow DNS news, you may know that ICANN has put in place a program to introduce many new generic top level domains (GTLD) into the DNS. I haven't been a fan. ICANN says there is market demand for GTLD expansion (perhaps), and that it allows innovation in the DNS ecosystem (how?). It probably will have an effect of diluting the entrenched market power of the big TLD operators (.com, .org etc), which may be a good thing. But the system may end up being primarily a significant financial windfall for ICANN. Even Esther Dyson (original ICANN chair) has spoken out against the program.

There appear to be some trademark protection mechanisms built in to the new system. But it seems clear that many organizations will rush to defensively register their names under some of the new TLDs. Strictly speaking, DNS domain names have no intended or actual relation to trademarks, but we have to deal with the real world. My university's upper administration has already contacted the IT department to discuss the topic. A while back, we defensively registered "upenn.xxx" to protect against possible reputational damage (and no, I wasn't involved in that decision).

On a more technical note, one interesting and welcome feature of the new GTLDs, is that they must be deployed with DNSSEC. This should significantly increase the proportion of signed top level domains in the DNS. My dnsstat DNS monitoring site has been monitoring the TLDs for a while now, and I just updated it with the latest list of TLDs.

    http://www.huque.com/app/dnsstat/category/tld/

Since late August, 32 new TLDs have been introduced, 27 normal GTLDs, 5 IDN (Internationalized domains) TLDs. But 11 IDN TLDs have also disappeared. That's a net gain of 21 TLDs, bringing the total count to 339.

Some DNSSEC specific stats: 143 (or 42.2%) of the TLDs are signed with DNSSEC. Here's a breakdown of type key and zone signing algorithms in use for the signed TLDs:

Key Signing Keys (KSK):
RSASHA256 (8) = 119 (63.0%)
RSASHA512 (10) = 6 (3.2%)
RSASHA1 (5) = 16 (8.5%)
RSASHA1-NSEC3-SHA1 (7) = 48 (25.4%)

Zone Signing Keys (ZSK):
RSASHA256 (8) = 133 (62.4%)
RSASHA512 (10) = 8 (3.8%)
RSASHA1 (5) = 17 (8.0%)
RSASHA1-NSEC3-SHA1 (7) = 55 (25.8%)

Note: new GTLDs continue to be added, so the numbers in this article might be out of date soon.

Here are the added TLDs so far (as of November 20th 2013):

+ bike
+ camera
+ clothing
+ construction
+ contractors
+ diamonds
+ directory
+ enterprises
+ equipment
+ estate
+ gallery
+ graphics
+ guru
+ holdings
+ kitchen
+ land
+ lighting
+ photography
+ plumbing
+ sexy
+ singles
+ tattoo
+ technology
+ tips
+ today
+ ventures
+ voyage

Here are the new IDN TLDs:

+ xn--80asehdb
+ xn--80aswg
+ xn--mgba3a4f16a
+ xn--ngbc5azd
+ xn--unup4y

Here are the deleted IDN TLDs:

- xn--0zwm56d
- xn--11b5bs3a9aj6g
- xn--80akhbyknj4f
- xn--9t4b11yi5a
- xn--deba0ad
- xn--g6w251d
- xn--hgbk6aj7f53bba
- xn--hlcj6aya9esc7a
- xn--jxalpdlp
- xn--kgbechtv
- xn--zckzah

Note: one IDN TLD (xn--l1acc) has had a severely busted DNSSEC deployment for a while. My monitoring system detects that its DS records in the root of the DNS do not match any DNSKEY records in the zone, and furthermore, the signatures on the DNSKEY records have expired. I hope they get their act together soon.

--Shumon Huque