Re: [DNSOP] additional special names Fwd: I-D Action: draft-chapin-additional-reserved-tlds-00.txt

[Joe Abley <[e-mail]>]

On 2014-02-03, at 11:15, Paul Hoffman <[e-mail]> wrote:

> On Feb 3, 2014, at 7:19 AM, Stephane Bortzmeyer <[e-mail]> wrote:
> 
>> "squatted" is not a bad word here. In the physical world, squatters
>> are often people who do not have the money to rent a home, because
>> some rich people put the price of the housing too high. Here, you will
>> have trouble convincing the users of Tor or Namecoin that it is right
>> to pay 185 000 $ for a TLD and that, if they cannot afford it, they
>> have to stay in the slums.
>> 
>> [End of political rant, sorry]
> 
> Your political rant is, however, off-base. Assume for the moment that the Tor folks had registered oniontld.fr for a relatively small amount of money. It could have all of the attributes of .onion: you could hard-wire it into local resolvers, some requests for it would leak to the DNS and therefore possibly be trackable, and so on. For the purposes given in draft-grothoff-iesg-special-use-p2p-names, unsquatted FQDNs would work just as well as squatted TLDs.

I made that point somewhat earlier (but my example was onion.eff.org or something).

The reasonable response to my instance of that observation was that there's a significant deployed base of users already making use of .onion [1], and we don't have a time machine that we're aware of [2] to allow that to be fixed.

Despite the enduring (and endearing, perhaps) optimism that the new gTLD programme would eventually bear fruit, I don't think it's unreasonable to think that in 2002 [3] a new gTLD wasn't really a practical option to choose not to take.

So squatting doesn't sound right to me.


Joe

[1] https://metrics.torproject.org
[2] http://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/2012/07/02/stephen-hawking-time-travel_n_1643488.html
[3] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tor_(anonymity_network)#History