Re: [DNSOP] [[e-mail]: I-D Action: draft-grothoff-iesg-special-use-p2p-names-00.txt]

[Joe Abley <[e-mail]>]

On Monday 2 December 2013 at 11:17, Ted Lemon wrote:

> RFC 6761 has IETF consensus, and does not propose adding new namespaces under .arpa, but rather at the top level. Here's what RFC3172 says on the topic of .arpa:
>  
> This domain is termed an "infrastructure domain", as its role is to
> support the operating infrastructure of the Internet. In particular,
> the "arpa" domain is not to be used in the same manner (e.g., for
> naming hosts) as other generic Top Level Domains are commonly used.

Perhaps 3172 needs to be updated to reflect current IAB practice, then. It's not hard to find examples of names under ARPA which contradict the text you quoted (e.g. see RFC 5855).
> Aside from the purely practical matter that having special domains live under .arpa would be more complicated to implement,

This feels like an over-general pronouncement that can't hope to be accurate in all cases. Why is it more complicated in the general case? More complicated than what?
> it doesn't make sense. Consider .local—our main example of a special-use domain. Would it make sense for .local to be under .arpa? I don't think so. .local is specifically not "internet infrastructure." It isn't even DNS. It's an escape from the DNS namespace, with different semantics than domain names in the DNS.

I think you're sharing personal opinion rather than citing fact ("make sense"). The .local convention happened to be adopted by Apple for use in a DNS-like protocol, and was documented (and the IN-class top-level label reserved) later. They could equally well have adopted .local.arpa or .local.apple.com.

I'm not complaining about Apple's innovation here, or their decision to document it at the IETF. But I don't think it's sufficient to assert that alternatives would not have made sense without justifying why that is so.
> The other proposed special uses are similar. Putting them under .arpa might be _expedient_, because it avoids the whole change control question, but that's pretty much the only way I can think of that it makes sense.

It doesn't avoid the whole change control question -- it just reduces the change control to one with a single, uncontentious decision point (the IAB). By contrast, the business of identifying reserved strings (and enforcing their non-delegation for other purposes) in the root zone is fraught with administrative ambiguity.


Joe