[DNSOP] On squatting and draft-grothoff-iesg-special-use-p2p-names

[Paul Hoffman <[e-mail]>]

On Jan 1, 2014, at 1:36 PM, Christian Grothoff <[e-mail]> wrote:

> Well, my point is that if you expect everybody to first get an RFC through
> to document everything they are doing, expect squatting.

We do. And squatters should expect that the name that they are using might eventually be legitimately assigned later, possibly to someone whose intentions are quite different from the squatters. This is how the IETF has worked for over 20 years. The purpose of RFC 6761 is not to say "if you start squatting on a TLD, you will be able to later get it reserved". It is to say "if there are legitimate errors in TLD use, those can be dealt with".

It seems that one of the themes of your responses here is "the TLDs are now being used in software and we won't change that software ever". If that is a correct reading, then there really isn't any reason to move forwards on these requests. The folks using the names are squatting, and will continue to do so regardless of the outcome of the application, much less the outcome of ICANN later allocating those TLDs to someone else.

On the other hand, if the software using the currently-squatted TLDs are willing to change the names, there is room for discussion. One possibility for RFC 6761 is that an application can specify a use for a non-allocated TLD, and a random string (short, typeable, but unlikely to be wanted by anyone in the ICANN space) can be generated for that. So, instead of ".bit" (which has high value), ".gp4x7" could be allocated. That gets the community what they want (a string that ICANN is prevented from later allocating) and follows the spirit of RFC 6761.

--Paul Hoffman