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

[Paul Hoffman <[e-mail]>]

On Dec 2, 2013, at 7:16 AM, Andrew Sullivan <[e-mail]> wrote:

> On Sun, Dec 01, 2013 at 12:35:44PM -0500, Paul Wouters wrote:
>> 
>> It would make more sense to me to reserve something like .alt where
>> people can plugin onion.alt, gnu.alt, etc, and are guaranteed that
>> the .alt domain will never actually be delegated by the root. 
> 
> And, behold, we have .arpa already.  We could just create anything we
> wanted under there.  I don't get why some new TLD is needed.
> 
>> And once you go that way, one can wonder why not use the already
>> existing .local for that? Perhaps avoid talking to different protocol
>> software is a good enough reason not to re-use .local.
> 
> Certainly do not re-use .local for this.  The reason mDNS needed a
> different TLD is (to drastically oversimplify) because it uses the TLD
> as a protocol-shift token: when you're in .local, you're actually
> using a different protocol, and this is a way to keep the otherwise
> parallel name-space aligned.  (This is the fourth extension mechanism
> we have in the DNS: we have RRTYPEs, CLASSes, underscore labels, and
> TLDs.  Hurray!)
> 
>> The traditional reasons for not using any non-IN class is that a lot
>> of software would not work well with that, but in these cases, the
>> consumers aren't actually interested in real DNS anyway, and using
>> a URI that indicates a different class should not be too hard to plug
>> into existing browsers? 
> 
> The last such proposal was a mechanism to use a new CLASS for IDN
> support.  It turned out it wouldn't work because (among other reasons)
> there were too many resolvers that spit up on any CLASS other than IN.
> I am dubious that has improved, though I'd be prepared for evidence
> that it had.

SLDs under .arpa are cheap and easily managed by the IETF. Forcing someone into a different class (where all sorts of things could block by accident) seems silly.

--Paul Hoffman