Re: [DNSOP] draft-liman-tld-names-04

[Stephane Bortzmeyer <[e-mail]>]

On Wed, Nov 17, 2010 at 11:45:55AM -0500,
 Andrew Sullivan <[e-mail]> wrote 
 a message of 81 lines which said:

> The only avenue open to people who think this draft should not be
> published is to claim that the "will be alphabetic" claim in RFC1123
> is not and never was an assertion to the rest of the network about
> what assumptions they might legitimately make about TLDs.

Correct.

> If you think that we do in fact need an update to 1123 to clarify
> things, then there is nothing at all wrong with publishing this
> document right now, in order to allow the minimum necessary, and
> then revisiting the question more completely

Then I disagree: currently, nothing really forbids TLD-with-digits
such as .3com or .fun4u If we publish draft-liman-tld-names-04 as it
is, then the issue will be seen by many as settled and people will say
"See, TLD-with-digits are forbidden by IETF" (when, today, people who
dislike TLD-with-digits have to create their own policy). It will be
much more difficult to change it after that.

Note that there is no emergency for this document: it was supposed to
be necessary for IDN TLD but, as we all saw, IDN TLD were created,
proving that the entire issue of "RFC 1123 disallows it" was purely
political.