[DNSOP] Please review and provide feedback -- draft-stw-6761ext

[Warren Kumari <[e-mail]>]

Hi there,

It's time again for everyone's favorite topic -- Special Use Domain Names!

Back in October 2015 the IETF approved RFC7686 - 'The ".onion"
Special-Use Domain Name' -- those who were involved no doubt remember
that it was a really long and frustrating set of discussions, and we
determined that there is much broken in this process.

To job people's memory, Jari penned a nice summary here -
https://www.ietf.org/blog/onion/ :
"Some contention arose during the processing of the document in the
working group. There also was some discussion about needing to clarify
or adjust RFC 6761 before making any additions.
...
However, subsequent to this action, the IESG believes RFC 6761 needs
action, and substantial community input. It needs to be open for
review and modification because the current process is unscalable.
Several other names had also been submitted for consideration as
special names, and the RFC may not give adequate guidance about how
when names should be identified as special names. Special names should
also be, as the name implies – special and rare. The DNSOP working
group is chartered to address this RFC 6761 review."

The IESG tasked DNSOP with providing better guidance on how to handle
future requests to reserve names under the RFC6761 process[0]. As part
of that we wrote RFC8244 - "Special-Use Domain Names Problem
Statement", which "should be considered required reading for IETF
participants who wish to express an informed opinion on the topic of
Special-Use Domain Names.".  RFC8244 "presents a list, intended to be
comprehensive, of the problems that have since been identified", but
we ran out of steam without actually *solving* the issues.

Later (April 2016) RFC7788 - "Home Networking Control Protocol" was
published which included "A network-wide  zone is appended to all
single labels or unqualified zones in order to qualify them. ".home"
is the default; ..." - this caused much excitement and was updated by
RFC8375 - "Special-Use Domain 'home.arpa.'" which says to use
home.arpa instead of .home.
This was helped by the IAB statement -
https://www.iab.org/documents/correspondence-reports-documents/2017-2/iab-statement-on-the-registration-of-special-use-names-in-the-arpa-domain/

This helps, but still doesn't solve many of the issues with RFC6761
style reservations, and wouldn't have really solved the .onion case if
it came along now - the IETF, and the IESG would still be in the
sticky position of how to evaluate if .onion should be placed in the
SUDN registry.

Suzanne has a document which I'd appreciate review and discussion of
-- "Guidelines for Use of the Special Use Names Registry"
(https://tools.ietf.org/html/draft-stw-6761ext-01).
As Stephane pointed out, this doesn't solve for issues *outside* the
IETF, but it does (hopefully) "define guidelines for the IESG and the
IETF community on the interpretation of RFC 6761 and the use of the
special use names registry."


I know that people are tired of this whole topic, but I'd really
appreciate some more of your time reviewing and providing feedback on
this topic; this issue isn't going to go away...

As Suzanne is one chairs, she will not be participating in any of the
consensus calls, etc - Benno and Tim can handle that (this is obvious,
but Suzanne asked me to mention it for completeness).


W
[0]: There is lore that the IESG actually halted reservations under
the 6761 process, but that doesn't seem to be the case, or, if it is,
I cannot find a reference; if there is anything saying so, can someone
please send a link?

-- 
I don't think the execution is relevant when it was obviously a bad
idea in the first place.
This is like putting rabid weasels in your pants, and later expressing
regret at having chosen those particular rabid weasels and that pair
of pants.
   ---maf