Re: [ga] Re: Root server traffic

["Ram Mohan" <rmohan@xxxxxxxxxxxx>]

> I am far from being a technical guru, therefore I might stand corrected, 
> but
> AFAIK the Chinese use a translation of an url of the type
> <domain_name>.<IDN_TLD> into <domain_name>.<IDN_TLD>.cn.
Roberto, from what I have heard - this is what's being done:
<domainname>.公司 is translated into <domainname>.公司.com.cn (with 公司's 
punycode equivalent) and then sent through the regular DNS system.  The 
tweaks to the DNS are to append the ".com.cn" to the end of the label.
-ram
----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Roberto Gaetano" <roberto@xxxxxxxxx>
To: "'Joe Baptista'" <baptista@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Cc: "'Ross Rader'" <ross@xxxxxxxxxx>; <ga@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Sent: Friday, November 23, 2007 7:53 AM
Subject: RE: [ga] Re: Root server traffic


Joe Baptista wrote:
> Well how do you explain .elvis? or .corp? Neither are mistypes.
Correct. However, they are still bogus, because they are quesries sent to
the wrong service.
This is sort of what I call the "Cacao Meravigliao" effect (one of this days
I will send an off-topic message to describe the phenomenon to folks who,
due to age or geographical location, were not exposed to it): the request is
formally compliant with what you have heard about, but addressed the wrong
person.


> What is happening here is people sharing URLs outside their
> local root are causing a good deal of the heavy traffic at
> IANA roots. China is one excellent example of this. The
> chinese TLDss 中国 (which means “China"),
> 公司 (which means “company"), and 网络 (which means “net") are
> used by over 50 million people daily. When those people
> communicate with others who do not use the china root and
> send them china root URLs then anytime those IANA users click
> on these URLs the net result is the root servers get queried.
> That means the logs at the IANA roots show traffic for these
> TLDs, or more specifically their IDN equivalents.
I am far from being a technical guru, therefore I might stand corrected, but
AFAIK the Chinese use a translation of an url of the type
<domain_name>.<IDN_TLD> into <domain_name>.<IDN_TLD>.cn. This translation is
done by the ISP, without the user knowing. So, when users outside China try
to refer to an url of that type, they get what is fairly logical to get: an
error. This affects users resident outside China, as well as Chinese
travelling abroad. The equivalent example in terms of telephone, is somebody
calling a chinese number without dialling the +86, and expecting it to work:
it does while you are in China, while it does not from outside China.


> Think about it folks - that 50 million users accessing TLDs
> outside the IANA deprecated root. Anytime those users
> communicate with other using those URLs - bingo the roots get
> a request for something they don't know. And I suspect 50
> millions users associated with those TLDs are causing alot of
> error traffic at the IANA roots.
True, that it generates a lot of bogus traffic.
False, that they are trying to access sites not reachable via the standard
root.
The so-called "Chinese root" is only a [set of] branch[es] under the .cn
TLD. These IDN TLDs are, in fact, IDN SLDs under .cn. Something that exists
under many TLDs in the standard root, and something that can be easily
accessed if you use the "real" url, not relying on a translation by an
intermediate element of the chain.
As a matter of fact, the argumentation used based on the observation of the
high error rate is the most powerful argument I have seen so far for a
unique interoperable system: if you do not use the standard, you get lots of
errors.


Cheers,
Roberto