Re: [DNSOP] followup and proposed actions: RFC 6761 interim and next steps

[Suzanne Woolf <[e-mail]>]

(no hats, as I haven't discussed with my co-chair and AD.)

On May 27, 2015, at 3:22 PM, Lyman Chapin <[e-mail]> wrote:

> We don't know each other, but if I may assume that you work for Uniregistry (apologies if I'm jumping to the wrong conclusion from the domain name in your email address), you have a clear conflict of interest as a gTLD applicant for "home". Your viewpoint and comments are still valuable, and I mean no disrespect when I suggest that you have a conflict; but I hope that when Tim and Suzanne refer to "consensus of the WG" they mean "except for WG participants who have a clear COI".

For the reasons pointed out by Jim Reid in the next message, I think this heads in the wrong direction.

Perhaps more to the point, my experience of the IETF suggests that since contending interests are a fact of life, and that WG discussion frequently engages vendors, their competitors, their customers, and their vendors all at once, claims about others' conflicts of interest are a poor substitute for addressing arguments on the merits (which you get full credit for attempting to do, and can stand on its own).

> Having heard no (disinterested) objection to putting corp, home, and mail in the special-use name registry defined by RFC 6761, perhaps the WG chairs would proceed with a call for adoption of draft-chapin-additional-reserved-tlds-02 -

It would be helpful to me in discerning consensus to separate two different concepts here.

1. Delegating home/corp/mail in the root zone would be bad.
2. Adding home/corp/mail to the special-use name registry would be good.

Again, trying my best to speak as a disinterested observer of the discussion, I've seen little support for such delegations(1). I've seen a couple of arguments that seem to have strong support against such delegations.

However, that's not the question in front of the WG. The IETF doesn't decide what goes into the root zone. ICANN does, and appears to have already decided (stipulating that not everyone believes them, which strikes me as a separate problem) not to add those names to the root zone.

The question in front of the WG is whether to propose adding those names to the IETF registry for special-use names(2). I've heard support for that, but I've also heard a number of objections to such additions, and I'm having trouble telling how much the support for (2) is really support for (1) or vice versa.

It remains less than obvious to me what outcome is being sought here. I first thought it was to influence the body that *does* decide what goes into the root zone against a possible future change in policy, but it's also been repeatedly asserted that no, the proposal is motivated by operational considerations.

I realize I may be dim, but what operational impact is sought here?  What change in server or resolver configuration are administrators expected to make? Is there some other possible source of name collisions besides a change in the root zone that we can or should be guarding against? Given that the problem people seem concerned about developed entirely outside of any action by the IETF, how does the IETF acting now help?

I understand the argument that the IETF can and should prevent such a misstep by ICANN, so reiterating it won't help me. 


thanks,
Suzanne