Dear colleagues, I work for the Internet Society but this is emphatically not the position of the Internet Society.
On Sun, Oct 16, 2022 at 03:03:10PM +0000, Suzanne Woolf wrote:
2. Having the IETF maintain a registry of pseudo-SLDs concerns me on the basis that having the IETF “recognize” (if only by recording) such pseudo-delegations may serve to attract unwanted attention to the IETF’s supposed recognition of alternate (non-DNS) namespaces as reservations of the namespace from the shared, common DNS root. We’re still being denounced in certain corners for .onion. It might be good to have a paragraph calling out specifically why .alt is not a delegation of a TLD from the DNS root by the IETF, even though it looks like one. (We didn’t invent this problem, because we didn’t make the decision that top-level domain labels should be used by other protocols in a way that led to confusion. But let’s not propagate it.)
I think I might not entirely agree with the reasoning above, but I very strongly agree that it would be a bad idea to create a registry for this innovation with any change control either held or delegated by the IETF. The point of the alt namespace, if it has any point at all, is to create a protocol-switch in the DNS using in-band signalling via a label. That protocol switch is there to say, "You are now outside the DNS." It is a mechanism by which someone could in principle put these alternative identifiers into what may be thought of as "domain name slots" and hope that somehow there is the appropriate handler for such identifiers to work. Attempting to police or advise about such a chaotic namespace is a doomed venture. There is little reason to suppose it won't be polluted with entries that do not work or that cease to work over time. There is little reason to suppose that any exclusivity rule could be enforced, so any protocol wishing to use one of these identifiers needs to be prepared to deal with another, conflicting use of the same name anyway. (To show why this is true, consider the use of labels like .home and .lan that were not registered in the DNS but that were in wide use by various independent operators in not-very-consistent ways. At least in that case, they all used the DNS wire format.) And, since alt is explicitly saying, "You're not in the DNS," there's not even a single protocol that will want these kinds of identifiers. Anyone who has been through a corporate renumbering that resulted from corporate merger and the discovery of awkward RFC 1918 number collisions knows that there are basically two kinds of registries for identifiers on the Internet: globally-unique registries, and everything else. There is no way to make this a globally unique registry, and yet someone will surely think that by getting their label in it they have some claim on that label. This puts whoever is maintaining the registry squarely in the crosshairs of litigious people for whom technical reality is no barrier to argument. Finally, it seems to me that the creation of such a registry presents a serious problem for IANA. IANA, recall, is in part subject to a Customer Standing Committee with representation from three operational communities. If I came from the names operational community and saw IANA setting up a registry for something that at first glance will look like an end run around names community processes (however justified such processes might be), I would ask some pretty pointed questions about what IANA is doing. So, to my mind, creating a registry that won't have any real effect, that won't scale, that will almost certainly hold useless registrations, and that presents both political and legal risks for the Internet, is something a document shouldn't do. Best regards, A -- Andrew Sullivan a...@anvilwalrusden.com _______________________________________________ DNSOP mailing list DNSOP@ietf.org https://www.ietf.org/mailman/listinfo/dnsop
