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

[George Michaelson <[e-mail]>]

We agree its a view well out of scope. I don't agree we should imagine this
_decision_ is devoid of consequence in the real world and can be treated as
a technical question with no other consideration.  I think almost any
decision made on technical merit facing the questions of naming and
addressing faces tough questions outside of the narrow domain. Thats why
people have brains: to think about consequences.

Its not un-like questions around GM in the biosciences world. You think
biologists don't want to say "oh, nobody would be insane enough to release
a modified virus which we changed from contact to airborne infection into
the world, this is just science. we should stick to our domain and not get
involved in this morality issue" -Well.. the backlash from science funding
and even within Science on that question was massive. No, it is NOT a good
idea to put the genome of an airborne virus into the public domain. Its bad
social policy.

So its not that we can't make technologically narrow decisions about names:
I am asking if its even a good idea.

I don't think its a good idea. I don't much care that its been blessed by
an RFC. I think its a mistake, with consequences. I think it legitimises
squatting, and makes other decisions on names and addresses harder in the
future. Its special pleading.

I have no technical grounds other than a sense the decision to 'cross the
beams' and place TOR at peril of gethostbyname() was a fundamental mistake
which should not be "blessed" by reserving a word in gethostbyname() space
to stop the problem.

-G

On Thu, May 14, 2015 at 1:06 PM, Ted Lemon <[e-mail]> wrote:

> On May 14, 2015, at 3:42 AM, George Michaelson <[e-mail]> wrote:
> >
> > I have a lot of agreement for what David is saying. What I say below may
> not of course point there, and he might not agree with me because this
> isn't a bilaterally equal thing, to agree with someone, but I do. I think I
> do agree with what he just said.
> >
> >
> > I think that prior use by private decision on something which was
> demonstrably an administered commons, with a body of practice around how it
> is managed, is a-social behaviour.
>
> I think this is completely out of scope for the IETF,   The IETF has the
> job of deciding what works, not adjudicating what is fair.
>
> We could never get consensus on what is fair here—for example, I find your
> position on this upsetting, because from a technical perspective what both
> the onion folks, the corp folks, apple, and for that matter hamachi did was
> simply expedient and sensible in the context of the time in which it was
> done, and not anti- or a-social, as you suggest. I do not mean to say that
> you are wrong, but simply to illustrate that this is not something about
> which we are likely to ever achieve consensus.
>
> Nor should we. We simply need to do our job and decide on a technical
> level whether we want to add these names to the special use registry. We
> should stop arguing about morality and just do that.