Well, your good friend is now here, the .micro. dotMicro is a new top level domain (TLD) that is hosted on OpenNIC that is open for business to anyone that has something micro to share. Wether it be a local economy or a small micronation, even a microuniversity! It can all be given a name thanks to OpenNIC.

How do I get the .micro top level domain? Well, it’s simple, all you have to do is get your computer to use OpenNIC domain name servers (see the client setup guide here). Boom, there it is! What, did you expect to be hard?

But the fun just doesn’t stop there! Any domain that you register on .micro has the best possible price tag on it. Free. That’s right. You pay absolutely nothing for the priveldge of owning your own dotMicro domain! So what are you waiting for? Get out your favorite brower, and go register your .micro domain today.

Thank you very much, I am proud to accept the award for the major ‘Oh Damn’ of the year. This ‘Oh Damn’ silently broke ns5′s .ing TLD for a smal time…

This was in Galium, and a new release solving this and two other minor issues will be released soon, for the time being, grab the patch at http://hg.sharesource.org/galium/raw-rev/861da6f25b75 … just patch it with -p1

(Deepa on #opennic, irc.freenode.net)

dig au NS @4.2.2.2 | grep ^au. | wc -l

The command above returns “8“, which means that the Australian top level domain has eight name servers that might be queried when you type in any website who’s domain name ends in .au

dig com NS @4.2.2.2 | grep ^com. | wc -l

This command (notice how we are looking at the .com tld this time) returns “13“, which means that when you enter a domain name ending in .com, you could ask one of a possible 13 domain name servers around the planet for information about a domain in the .com TLD.

Interesting Internet Factoid!
47 out of the 264 active top level domains on the internet have either two or three nameservers set as being authoritative (that is, they are allowed to respond to requests for that top level domain, that they are seen as a master). That’s a nice 18% of all top level domains. (This information was correct 29th July 2008 … 1am).

To run a top level domain, we will assume that we need three machines! If you want to get in with the new TLD craze, where ICANN have opened up registration of TLD’s, you will need at least three servers to act as namerservers. This is a very safe bet.

How much does three servers cost? Well, before your start Googling for webhosts – wait. You will need either a dedicated machine or a VPS.

In my experience, a simple machine can very easily handle a load of 1,000 DNS queries a second, so, logically thinking, if you have three machines, your new top level domain would be able to handle around 2,500 queries a second!

A quick Google for dedicated hosts showed that to get three servers in three continents will cost me around $150 per server (in AUD) a month, which means, before you have even let one internet user access a website, you have paid $450. This is not counting the registration free for a new TLD that ICANN will probably ask you to pay them (early estimates are that a top level domain that is in the ICANN root will cost about $10,000 … I am guessing for $25,000 and $100,000 or more for “premium” top level domains like .blog).

The raw cost!

Now, think about that for a second. This means that for three years of operation at a minimum you would be looking at 10000+(450*12*3)+(40000*3) or $146,200.

That is, $10,000 for the registration free to get your new Top Level Domain into the ICANN’s roots, $450 a month for three years to pay for three name servers (you will need more as the top level domain gets more popular, as I said above, dot com has around thirteen servers. The price also pays for food and coffee for three administrators ($40,000)

Sounds like a lot, but if the registrar owner makes $4 on each domain, then only 36,550 domains need to be sold to customers.

Running a top level domain that is in the ICANN/IANA root is relatively easy. The biggest stumbling block will be the amount of money that is required.

In my next post, I will look at the software end. What software is required in order for customers to register domains? What is needed for you to serve clients with responses to a top level domain, and of course, it would not be me without explaining how you can put your top level domain live on the internet without paying a free to ICANN or IANA!

All you need to take advantage of dotING is to be a user of OpenNIC. OpenNIC is a community effort to create an alternative root, which compliments that of the traditional ICANN root server. This means that OpenNIC is able to provide alternative top level domains. There are many reasons I don’t like ICANN, and ultimately don’t trust it, and RegisterFly is just the start of the reasons.

Switching to OpenNIC is easy to do, it’s as simple as changing your DNS settings, which you can read all about on the OpenNIC website.

A friend of mine, Tim Post, when I he gave me the idea about starting the .ing top level domain, created a list of all possible “premium” dotING domain names.

So, now is the time to switch to OpenNIC. Not only because there are many cool top level domains (like .ing, .geek or .oss) but also to push forward for a community controlled internet. Sure, we have open source operating systems and compilers, and we even have open source dns servers. Now at last, we have “open source” root servers.