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I'm implementing my own domain seller targeted towards making domain names easy enough for the average person to use. I'd like to move towards a world where you can read the current authoritative TTL and guarantee the user everything will be updated within that time, rather than saying "Up to 48 hours".

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There will never be guarantees.

The "up to 48 hours" is commonly used because that's the ttl of many things that matter. For instance, NS records for names in the .com zone have 48 hour ttls.

You can give better estimates to your users if you know the state you're transitioning from. For instance, a brand new .com domain would be 15 min negative ttl plus the .com zone file update frequency.

Well yeah nothing is 100% guaranteed. Including the 48 hour rule. Technically ISPs could set every TTL to take weeks. But I maintain we can make a lot of progress reducing the size of the long tail. Sometimes you have to work with broken systems, but why leave things broken that don't need to be? DNS TLL compliance can be improved one organization at a time.

Why are you so confident there’s a big problem to solve here?

Because every provider I'm aware of still recommends 48 hours?

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