On 10/01/2016 07:12 PM, Paul Wouters wrote: > > the IETF doesn't have the money for lawyers in that arena. > > [snip] > > I do not think the IETF should create "Special Names" that conflict > with the naming process which has been delegated to ICANN. > > [snip] > > The IETF giving them .onion in itself has been a very risky decision. It > was based on no Big Corporation having an interest in the string. With > .gnu people did not feel as sure about that. I think that's part of the > reason .gnu was not also going to make it like .onion. These decisions > are quicksand. >
Thank you for verbalizing that. Had it been done earlier, I'd have joined a commercial letter of interest of the GNU corporation who sells snowboards to the RFC as an appendix, in order to make a precedent that a technical document can be vested or vetoed by private interests based on legal risk and self-censorship. Given the recurrence on this list of the term "squatting" to refer to real use of a non-ICANN-sanctioned TLDs, and the assumption that people should be aware of IETF and ICANN processes and avoid using such names in the first place, that transpired in many negative comments of P2P Names, why not consider that corporations, being 'people', fall into the same bag as ourselves, and should be aware that there have been such a process going on for 3 years already, and they didn't claim anything about thoses requested TLDs, which shows *no prior interest* in doing so. I wonder what kind of court would accept a post-delegation lawsuit in these conditions. Nevertheless, I take note that finally, someone put that on the table clearly and honestly. I'd like to finish on the note that nothing in RFC 6761 *tells* ICANN to reserve a name. Instead it reaffirms that The IETF has responsibility for specifying how the DNS protocol works, and ICANN is responsible for allocating the names made possible by that DNS protocol. In RFC 2606, IANA considerations say: IANA has agreed to the four top level domain name reservations specified in this document and will reserve them for the uses indicated. So, even if the IETF reserves a name, it is more like a suggestion for ICANN to ponder. Maybe this should be clearly stated within the problem statement and following materials to avoid IETF self-censorship to avoid a legal threat. As a person, I'm not too keen on the idea that someone could sue something just because they can. That's a very late-20th century U.S.American notion that is not particularly welcome in the rest of the world, and secret corporate courts suing government or other institutions in the name of 'free trade' sound like neo-colonialism. So for good measure, *at least* one step to solve 'the problem' would be to make it clear that the legal responsibility goes to the big guy in the room, in our case, as for precedents in relevant RFCs, IANA. If this legal risk argument is the main show-stopper, I suggest it's vaporscare and *not technical*. ## Reminder The introduction of RFC 6761 gives its scope: However, "Reserved Top Level DNS Names" [RFC2606] does not state whether implementations are expected to treat such names differently, and if so, in what way. This document specifies under what circumstances special treatment is appropriate, and in what ways. Regards, == hk _______________________________________________ DNSOP mailing list DNSOP@ietf.org https://www.ietf.org/mailman/listinfo/dnsop
