Re: [DNSOP] punctuation follies, I-D Action: draft-ietf-dnsop-alt-tld-15.txt

[John Levine <[e-mail]>]

It appears that Peter Thomassen  <[e-mail]> said:
>I am proposing to reserve all top-level underscore labels (_*) for special use. Why?

While I don't think that reserving underscore names will break anything that is
not already broken, I also don't see what problem it solves.

Everything you say about *.alt is true, and most people who squat on
random top level hostnames will continue to do so. But there is a
great deal of software that expects the names it uses to look like
hostnames, and won't work with anything else. The argument for *.alt
is that if ICANN sells another round of vanity TLDs, as seems
depressingly likely, here's a hostname we promise won't have new name
collisions.

Since it is hard to imagine ever adding a name that isn't a hostname
to the public root, all of the _names are in practice reserved anyway.
But I don't recall ever seeing anyone squatting on a name that isn't
a hostname.  This should give us a hint.

R's,
John