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

[Stuart Cheshire <[e-mail]>]

On 29 Jan, 2014, at 07:47, Ralf Weber <[e-mail]> wrote:

> Where shall this stop? How about .LOKALESNETZWERK (german for .LAN). How many domains do we want to treat special? I know this draft only asks for 8, but some of them are on ICANNs application list.

Currently, with no established procedure for local-use names, the result is chaos. Since no DNS equivalent to RFC 1918 exists, people use whatever name they feel like. My hope is that if people are offered a short list of legitimate pseudo-TLDs for local-use names, the temptation to use some other TLD not on that list will be less. Today all NAT gateways I know of default to one of the RFC 1918 address ranges. If RFC 1918 did not exist, would NAT gateways not exist, or would they just hijack who-knows-what addresses? I suspect the latter.

If we acknowledge and document the reality, the IETF can have a role in guiding it in a sane direction. If we pretend local-use names don’t exist, then the IETF has less relevance in the real world and the real world carries on without us.

> I also don't think there are risks in delegation these other than the applicants will get lots of traffic.

No, the risk is that the applicants *won’t* get the traffic they want, because some user’s local DNS is answering those queries.

If we have *some* pseudo-TLDs reserved for local-use names, there’s a stronger argument that local hijacking of other names is illegitimate.

And yes, if you want .LOKALESNETZWERK, then argue for that. Let’s use this IETF discussion process to get some clarity on which names are local-use and which ones are not.

Stuart Cheshire