Dear colleagues,
[I'm employed by the Internet Society, and not speaking for them.]
On Wed, Nov 02, 2022 at 09:27:33PM +0000, Suzanne Woolf wrote:
The chairs set out some comments on the -17 version, which appear to have been
addressed in the -18 version. We agree with the editors that there are a couple
of issues that may need further discussion.
The time set aside for alt-tld in our meeting next week is intended to let us
we find out how far we might be from consensus on the current draft and whether
people still feel there are new things to say.
In the interests of not taking up meeting time, I thought I'd send a note here
to say that I think the current draft addresses such concerns as I had.
There are several things it does _not_ do that I think are important. It does
not specify anything about the wire or presentation format of possible names in
this space. It does not constrain the names in any way with rules about DNS or
its restrictions or so on. And it does not create any registry and just accepts
that those wishing to use this unmanaged namespace are on their own and had
better be prepared to deal with that.
The reason I think all of that important, in case it wasn't clear in previous
stuff I said, is that I conceive of this space as entirely dedicated to the
idea that there are other potential naming systems that are quite purposely
trying to address limitations in DNS. They will therefore, of necessity,
possibly be incompatible with any DNS limitation. If this namepsace is
constrained by DNS limitations, that will encourage people to avoid this
namespace, and so the goal of its creation would be undermined.
The reason I think the lack of a registry to be good is that it makes quite
clear that nobody can rely on a registry as somehow authoritative for this
namespace. The danger with a registry is that people treat it as authoritative
and therefore attempt to legislate deference to the registry. But we know that
at least some experiments in naming are explicitly disdainful of the idea of
authoritative registries. Such efforts almost certainly will not register their
presence, and so every protocol will need to cope with collisions anyway. If
that is true, then a registry has minimal technical value and has a potential
technical harm.
I therefore support proceeding with draft-ietf-dnsop-alt-tld-18. It is admittedly imperfect, but it is addressing an area where perfection is fundamentally impossible.
Best regards,
A
--
Andrew Sullivan
a...@anvilwalrusden.com
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