Re: [Arcing] Fwd: New Version Notification for draft-stw-whatsinaname-00.txt

["John Levine" <[e-mail]>]

>There seemed to be strong feeling in the ARCING BOF in BA that we needed a document that could serve as advice to
>protocol designers and software implementers, although it's not entirely clear where such a document should live. It's
>*not* intended for adoption by DNSOP; although it may ultimately include advice to DNS operators, that's not the
>primary purpose.

I read it, and it's all reasonable and informative, but I fear it'll
just be preaching to the converted.  The unconverted will continue to
say "yeah, ok, I know all that but I still need to reserve .BANANA"

We have a severe perverse incentive.  On the one hand, we tell people
that squatting on domain names is bad for all sorts of reasons, and
we're not going to let people reserve desirable names for non-DNS use
for other reasons.  Then anyone who's paying attention can see that
what you actually do is pick the name you want and squat on it with
extreme vigor, until we say, oh, all right, just this once.  Or maybe
we don't, but unless there's some external situation like the one for
.onion certificates, they hand out software that uses the name they
want anyway and if the names leak, too bad.

Until and unless we can de-perversify the situtation, I don't see much
point in offering more advice.

R's,
John