ICANN Announcements

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Draft Delegation Rate Scenarios for New gTLDs

3 March 2010

Root Zone Scaling - In February 2009, with Resolution 2009-02-03-04, the ICANN Board requested the Root Server System Advisory Committee (RSSAC), the Security and Stability Advisory Committee (SSAC), and ICANN staff, including the IANA team, to study potential issues regarding the addition of substantial numbers of new TLDs to the root zone.

As part of this continuing effort ICANN commissioned an internal study of different scenarios for application volumes. Using the procedures in the Draft Applicant Guidebook as a foundation, ICANN staff modeled a series of scenarios based on the number of applications received in the first round of new gTLD applications. This draft paper [PDF, 326 KB] summarizes the results of the model and provides, as a reference, the source for the parameters used to predict the rate of growth in delegations to the root zone of the DNS. In particular, the model shows that, even under a scenario where there are very many applications for new gTLDs, the rate of growth of the root zone would remain linear.