David, I am really glad you are CTO, as I appreciate you weighing in on this (and I am a sucker for a Star Wars reference).<div><br></div><div>Clearly, SPAM ("Sith Penetrate All Media" ;) ) is patient zero of UA disruption. Second only to evolutionary resistance, followed by snap judgment,</div><div><br></div><div>I share a similar experience with router-lords within NANOG meetings from lunch discussions with people who are responsible for massive systems and networks. Anecdotally speaking, the abstract/overall sentiment on New TLDs that I heard in the informal and more authentic settings (lunches, hallway banter, etc.) was unfavorable. Even from people whose employer were applicants.</div><div><br></div><div>Somehow, there is a belief that TLD makes for correlation with SPAM. Actually it is more often TLD pricing, but researching prices of domains is more cumbersome than the "kill everyone and let god sort them out" approach. </div><div><br></div><div>Essentially, New TLDs are viewed as being a complexity introduced to their jobs that exists only for marketing purposes, and it represents change that increases their workload like any change in technology. But in this case there is also the "we are once again pushing brooms as cleanup behind the parade marketing threw" angle as well.</div><div><br></div><div>I have heard similar annoyance expressed at various points over the past few decades over the router-lords having to react to the increasing bandwidth needs when WWW and then VOIP and Video became more and more popular. I am not comparing WWW invention to New TLDs, just making the point on evolutionary resistance.</div><div><br></div><div>I respect the expressions of frustration from router-lords over the challenges that are introduced, as well as the way it triggers the battle for budget or reactive scenarios that plague day to day operations. I myself have lived it.</div><div><br></div><div>The anecdotal stories about evolutionary resistance and response scenarios typically carry an intensity, derived from tactical events that create a fire to put out at unforeseen times. If you take a long view, rolling the calendar forward a few years to where the changes are more mainstream though, the benefits of the changes start to manifest themselves, and the sentiment changes.</div><div><br></div><div>When faced with a reactive event, the solution is often less elegant or well thought out for their long term impact, but I respect how folks need to get on with their day job and normal responsibilities (or get back to sleep if paged in the middle of the night). And whatever band-aid gets put in place at the point of reaction can have lasting consequences.</div><div><br></div><div>I recall a time (1991) when a 64k ISDN was adequate internet connection for a company of 400 to use for their corporate WAN gateway, when it was primarily used for email. But SPAM was ever increasing, and consistently choking the connection, and monitoring was paging the on call sysadmins at all hours to remedy things.</div><div><br></div><div>The IT department budget for capacity and equipment solutions that would have aided in mitigating the issue were constantly denied, so the admin and I wrote a shell script that executed on the system our SMTP gateway attached to, which would sweep through the sendmail queue directories and purge out emails from any addresses that did not have com, net, or org at the end of the FROM address.</div><div><br></div><div>Tick the box next to "solved" for IT, or so they thought until the CEO could not receive email from a .EDU and complained, then the sysadmin sighed and begrudgingly added it to the whitelist, and later a .<a href="http://co.uk">co.uk</a> (and thus began the whack-a-mole static list), each time having to make these annoying changes they would not have needed to make.</div><div><br></div><div>We ultimately got the budget and stopped the script from running. It had been particularly effective, but completely inelegant. And yet necessary. </div><div><br></div><div>I reckon there are quite a lot of solutions like this still running on systems throughout the Internet due to how effective they are.</div><div><br></div><div>I will say it again, clearly SPAM combat is patient zero of UA disruption. Followed by evolutionary resistance and snap judgment.</div><div><br></div><div>-Jothan</div><div><br></div><br><div><br></div><div><br></div><br><div><br></div><div><br></div><div><div><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0 0 0 .8ex;border-left:1px #ccc solid;padding-left:1ex"><br>
</blockquote></div></div><br><br>-- <br>Jothan Frakes<br>+1.206-355-0230 tel<br>+1.206-201-6881 fax<br>