Re: [DNSOP] Call for Adoption: draft-arends-private-use-tld

[Paul Wouters <[e-mail]>]

On Thu, 18 Jun 2020, Roy Arends wrote:

>> To me it seems that most dnsop people (me included) do not want to legitimize use unnecessary use of private names as it often causes unnecessary pain down the road - but at the same time I personally recognize the motivation for home.arpa. etc.
>
> I want to recognise two points here:
>
> 1) The lack of a private DNS domain is the main motivation to squat.

I would say the main motivation is a short and memorable TLD for their
purpose. The importance here is "their purpose". Do you think tor would
have settled for .zz instead of .onion ? Or that GNUnet people who
wanted .gnu will settle for .zz ? And if they did, how would you expect
browser plugins for these two _different_ uses of .zz to work?

i think people who want a memorable name, will still squat one, and not
use .zz.

> 2) Using a private namespace is sometimes necessary, and its use needs to be legitimised 
>
> Device makers ship their device with “dlinkrouter”, “belkin”, “modem”, “gateway”; phones are shipped with “getcacheddhcpresultsforcurrentconfig”; software is shipped with default configurations like  “openstacklocal”; renowned companies advise to configure “corp” and “internal” for private use, and ISPs are shipping home routers with “.telus” and “.home”. We have all seen those examples, have frowned upon it, and rant on various lists and fora.

> These companies all had motivations to choose these labels.

basically all the domains you list here could have used one of their own
domains (eg local.telus.com instead of .telus, etc)

> I know of two (imho legitimate) reasons, having learned this from a few organisations about why they prefer a squatted domain over a registered domain:
>
> They could have shipped with a label under their own brand, but that would be an astonishingly bad idea, considering the volume (reason one) and type of traffic that was meant to be private (reason two), they would receive, as all these configurations will cause something to “phone home” to them.

So why not have no local domain instead? Or just pickup the DHCP domain
name. This is just bad software design. But this group isn't going to
fix that.

However, if these bad engineers start using .zz for this. What will
happen is that ISPs are going to specially handle this queries, leading
to a new set of issues for users. For example, dropping the queries
instead of answering NXDOMAIN.

Lumping all these users together in .zz is just going to make each
individual group inside .zz want to not be there. So I don't think
your premise of letting them squat in one place will actually end up
happening.

> Additionally, why these organisations could to tell their users to not “squat”, find a registrar, buy a domain, renew it annually, etc, these users would move on to an organisation that says “just use .internal and you’ll be fine.”.

And those same people would not pick .zz but still pick their own more
appropriate names.

Also, people will get confused about "zee-zee" versus "zed-zed" :)

> I’d like to get this space recognised as “better than squatting”.

One bad actor using their space will mark other good actors are
potentially bad ones. I wouldn't want to share my squatting place
with sketchy individuals and protocols.

Paul