[dd] Proposed change to charter text paragraph 1

[Ben Schwartz <[e-mail]>]

Current:

The DNS protocol has traditionally had limited ability to signal to recursive resolvers about the
capabilities of authoritative servers they communicate with. In part, this stems from the inability of
parents (often registries) to specify additional information about child delegations (often registrants)
beyond NS, DS, and glue records. Further complicating matters is the inability of a registrant to signal
that the operation of a delegation point is being outsourced to a different operator, leaving a
challenge when operators need to update parental information that is only in the control of the child.
A significant issue in today’s deployed DNS that derives from these issues is data often being out of
synchronization between parents and children. Said another way, children often have more up-todate information about the nameservers and DNSSEC keying information than their parents due to
slowness, or complete lack, of automated child-to-parent updates.

Proposed:

In the DNS protocol, recursive resolvers have limited information about each nameserver before their first exchange.  At this step, resolvers only know the NS, DS, and glue records provided by the parent zone.  These records have been sufficient because authoritative DNS servers have traditionally been highly uniform, supporting the same protocols, and stable, changing DNSSEC KSKs and nameserver IP addresses only occasionally.

This uniformity and stability is beginning to change, with growing deployment of new protocols and novel DNSSEC configurations.  Nameservers are now often controlled by one or more third-party operators, not the child zone, complicating the process of updating records in the parent.  As a result, relevant information about nameservers is often out of date or inexpressible in the parent zone.