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

[Stephane Bortzmeyer <[e-mail]>]

On Tue, Feb 04, 2014 at 08:23:33AM +1100,
 Mark Andrews <[e-mail]> wrote 
 a message of 62 lines which said:

> There were plenty of people saying "Do NOT use a TLD for your
> private namespace, use a namespace you own" in 2002 whether it was
> for a protocol or a internal network.

Hmmm, the experience of many developers is that, no, it is not easy to
get advice from the IETF. Some did not even bother but those who did
were often turned down immediately. 

Let's play an experiment. In 2014, Joe Developer has a bright idea of
using cryptographic keys as domain names (yes, I know, there is
already the zkeys of GNUnet), he is going to write code to implement
it and wants a suffix for that, to be sure his domain names won't
collide with the ICANN root. Knowing nothing about Internet
governance, not having 185 000 US $ and a zillion lawyers at his
disposal to request a TLD, not being Apple, with the ability to squatt
a TLD and deploy it massively, he sends an email to dnsop or
namedroppers asking about advice. What happens?

1) (Most likely) He gets no reply at all because nobody knows him and
he never appeared in an IETF meeting

2) He gets a few messages saying "that's a bad idea, don't do that,
for reasons explained in [insert a long list of RFC]"

3) He gets a ton of messages saying it is a stupid idea and he is
endangering the security and stability of the Internet

4) He gets a sensible advice, based on a careful study of his
proposal, and given by people who forgives him for making a few
mistakes such as not being able to know what is the difference between
IETF and ICANN

In the first three cases, what will he do? He will follow the usual
Internet/free software method, implement and distribute and we'll see
what happens. And then it will be too late to change what's in his
code.