the ietf's stated purpose is to ensure interoperability. for many years we all treated that as "make sure everybody agrees as to the meaning of what's on the wire." the .ALT (or .EXTERNAL or whatever) specification will not change what's on the wire, but its purpose is still to ensure interoperability. simply put, we want any internet-capable device to have the same experience when using non-internet naming.
Sure, we all want that, but an IANA registry that only lets one entity register each name would be counterproductive, because names have semantic meaning. Nobody cares whether they get rrtype number or port number 42103 or 42104. But if two people show up with something that uses sex.alt, and IANA tries to tell one of them to use sey.alt instead, fat chance.
A simple FCFS will be full of squatters, not actually doing anything with the names, but hoping, probably wrongly, that the name will be valuable some day. (See the first couple of thousand registrations in any of ICANN's new TLDs for an example of this.) Furthermore, let's say someone's squatting on sex.alt, someone else builds a P2P* service, looks around, sees that nobody's actually using sex.alt, so he calls his sex.alt. Now the registry is actively wrong.
If we try to make rules about hoops one has to jump through to register a *.alt service, we're back exactly where we are now with .onion. People will ignore them until their critical mass becomes a fait accompli, so why bother. If two people show up about the same time with something called sex.alt, how are we supposed to decide who wins? We get to have our own IETF-lite version of the .africa fiasco currently happening at ICANN. And, of course, if we do pick one, the other will still keep calling itself sex.alt and there's nothing we can do about it.
That's why I think that a FCFS non-exclusive registry could be useful so that people who want to avoid collisions can find infor that lets them assess the collision risk for their favorite names, and it doesn't matter whether it's at IANA or somewhere else since it's just voluntary advice. Since we are not the Domain Name Police, if people want to create services with names that collide, they will do so. It'd be nuts to pretend otherwise.
R's, John * - Porn 2 Porn, of course _______________________________________________ DNSOP mailing list DNSOP@ietf.org https://www.ietf.org/mailman/listinfo/dnsop
