My colleague daniel has already gone home, so I'll chime in here as the person who included nic.ch in the ch zone a few years back :)
On Wed, 07 May 2014 16:55:45 +0200, Daniel Rechsteiner drechsteiner@goeast.ch said:
nic.ch is in the ch zone itself. So it's not a zone of its own.
You will find it in whois so that people see that it's not available anymore.
Thanks. I suspected something like that, so I compared this to other ccTLDs and it's different there, e.g. for nic.fr and denic.de you get NS records:
dig @ns1.denic.de denic.de ns dig @ns1.nic.fr nic.fr ns
Why is this different for nic.ch?
To avoid unnecessary redirection for the resolution of the ch name servers, which are part of the nic.ch domain (a.nic.ch, b.nic.ch etc). If nic.ch were a zone itself, we would need to make it as available as the ch zone to avoid certain failure modes. This would suggest to host it on the same set of servers that ch lives on. That's achieved automatically by making nic.ch part of the ch zone in the first place.
The se TLD does the same thing with ns.se, btw.