The Internet Namespace Cooperative
TINC Rules & Guidelines
Social Rules
Technical Rules
Guidelines
 

Social Rules

  1. No more than one top level domain allocated to an individual person or organization. This is to prevent land grabs, and immediate flattening of the name space.
  2. A maximum of 15 top level domains to be added to the current top level domains.
  3. A maximum of 2 top level domains added per year.
  4. Exceptions to 1, 2, and 3 may be made for certain specific reasons, subject to unanimous veto of the TINC steering committee:
    1. Infrastructure.
      Common infrastructure is important. Domain names created by the IETF, IANA, and their successors need to be uniformly visible from all sites. TINC will track and include any domains created by these bodies.
    2. Public good.
      Coherent collections of domains that require coordinated management should be maintained by a single registrar. The steering committee will implement the following mechanisms:
      1. Direct appeal to the members of TINC by majority of TINC registrars.
      2. Simply majority vote of Committee members.
    3. Popular demand via major network service providers Any domain requested by 10 or more major ISPs or companies owning the equivalent of a class B address space or greater shall be included in the TINC root.
  5. No top level domain names may conflict with current top level domains, even if those top level domains are not recognized by TINC. A "top level domain" is one that has currently functional name service at a level at least meeting the technical criteria for TINC-root domains set out below.
  6. This is a non-profit effort. Charges for top level domains will be minimal, if any.
  7. Running of the additional top level domains is completely the concern of the organization who created that top level domain. TINC is only concerned that the name servers for that TLD are reachable and technically sound.
 

Technical Rules

  1. For any top level domain, there must be at least two network-distant name servers running at all times. Network distant is defined as at least the last 4 hops differing in a traceroute to the servers from the TINC core at ies-energy.com. These servers must also reside in separate physical facilities to prevent outages caused by power failure, flood or similar disaster.
  2. The name servers running the top level domain must not be succeptible to any known security problems, such as cache corruption/poisoning and be kept current with regard to such problems, at least to the best-practice levels available from the most current, freely distributable software.
  3. The name servers running the top level domain must be reasonably compliant with the current rfc's related to DNS.
 

Guidelines

  1. It is recommended that servers for top level domains run a current version of BIND, or a similar, current, name server. In practical terms, the technical rules more or less require doing so.
  2. TLD's should have at least three servers, at network and geographic distance from each other. This will help prevent all your second level domains from disappearing if your network link or name server dies. In any event, while the technical rules require two network-distant servers in separate facilities, the third, separate and geographically distant server is strongly recommended.