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

[Joe Abley <[e-mail]>]

On 2014-01-29, at 11:40, Ralf Weber <[e-mail]> wrote:

> On 29 Jan 2014, at 08:10, Paul Hoffman <[e-mail]> wrote:
>>> I also don't think there are risks in delegation these other than
>>> the applicants will get lots of traffic.
>> 
>> Others disagree. ICANN has documented many scenarios where there are security problems when what was earlier expected to either get local resolution or an NXDOMAIN starts getting real answers.
> By risks I meant risks to the Internet as a whole.

A risk to the Internet as a whole is that a fragmented namespace (.LAN means something different in John's office than it does at the cafe next door; .HOME meaning something different to the thirty million subscribers of ISP X than it does to others) will restrict communication by name between endpoints on the Internet, and changes the fundamental assumptions on which protocols and applications rely to an extent that is potentially unbounded.

This is the end-to-end principle wearing a DNS t-shirt (the IP t-shirt was all cut up by a hundred million NATs, and is no good when it's cold out).

The trouble here is not recognising that namespace collisions are bad; it's (a) deciding where to draw the line between "bad" and "good enough" and (b) dealing with the political headaches of "use it, measure it, reserve it at the IETF" which costs $0 and "follow the ICANN new gTLD applicant guidebook" which costs substantially more.


Joe