Re: [apps-discuss] "finding registered domains"

[Andrew Sullivan <[e-mail]>]

On Mon, Mar 11, 2013 at 04:23:25PM -0400, Murray S. Kucherawy wrote:
> 
> I'd like to understand how these are related, or instead how they are
> actually totally different problem spaces.  I think this is important to
> figuring out a path forward.

In my opinion, these are in fact the very same problem, just with
different expressions.

At bottom, the issue is always that there is an attempt to read from
the hierarchical delegation space of the DNS some sort of
administrative commonality that just doesn't exist.  

In general, domain names just represent the labels of every node down
the DNS tree from the root zone.  So, the name
label1.label2.label3.example.com. names several levels of the DNS
tree.  And labelA.labelB.labelC.example.com. also names several levels
of the DNS tree.

What we _cannot_ tell from any of that is who is in control of which
parts.  This is true regardless of whether there are any delegations
(SOA records) in the tree anywhere along that FQDN.  You can tell that
example.com in both FQDNs are under the same control (because they're
the same node), but you can't tell whether example.com is controlled
by the same people who control .com (compare this with the co.uk/.uk
case).  Similarly, you cannot tell whether
labelA.labelB.labelC.example.com. is controlled by the people who
control example.com (compare this to web hotels, for instance, which
have of course mostly fallen out of fashion for this reason).  There
are some historically good pretty good rules of thumb, but that's all
they are.

The "cookies problem" is just a special case: the cookies spec had
peculiar rules about TLDs, and now has some special handling of
sibling and children relationships, but it's still both too broad and
too narrow.

Does this help?

Best,

A

-- 
Andrew Sullivan
[e-mail]