Re: [DNSOP] Interim DNSOP WG meeting on Special Use Names: some reading material

[Ted Lemon <[e-mail]>]

George, I didn't get into your game theory because I think it's irrelevant.  The IETF process is not a fast process. If parasitical organizations decide to try to get the calories they need from us rather than from ICANN, I am pretty sure they will quickly learn that this is futile. It might briefly suck for us while they learn that it won't work, but I don't think so.   We already know how to deal with useless proposals.

So with that in mind, I think we really are free to do the technically right thing without concern that it will encourage badness in the future.

As to the topic of fairness, that is inherently political, and we should steer well clear of it. There is no way we can reach consensus on it, and whether you want to admit it or not, by advancing the argument you are advancing, that is what you are asking us to do.

What you are saying is a really good argument against us reserving names simply because they have been squatted on.  I agree we should not use that as a reason to reserve a special use name.  ICANN already has a process for that    If we want to reserve a special use name, we should have a technical argument in favor of doing so.

But in the case of .onion, .corp and .home, we _do_ have such a reason. So there is no need to resort to the argument that these names should be documented in the special use registry because they were squatted on.

If .onion were being proposed today, and had no previous implementation, its proponents would rightly be arguing for .onion, not for .onion.alt, because how names read _matters_, and it makes sense for .onion to be a special use TLD, as it does for .corp and .home.

DNS has had a long run as the only name database that is taken seriously on the Internet, and so we no longer think of names as being something that has an existence independent of the DNS hierarchy, but that is not an inherent truth of domain names. It is just the status quo. I would not want to have to use a different name hierarchy designator in order to use mDNS, and that being the case, I don't think you can make the argument that .onion is qualitatively different from .local.