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

[Mark Andrews <[e-mail]>]

In message <[e-mail]>, Joe Abley writes:
>
> On 2014-02-03, at 11:15, Paul Hoffman <[e-mail]> wrote:
>
> > On Feb 3, 2014, at 7:19 AM, Stephane Bortzmeyer <[e-mail]>
> wrote:
> >
> >> "squatted" is not a bad word here. In the physical world, squatters
> >> are often people who do not have the money to rent a home, because
> >> some rich people put the price of the housing too high. Here, you will
> >> have trouble convincing the users of Tor or Namecoin that it is right
> >> to pay 185 000 $ for a TLD and that, if they cannot afford it, they
> >> have to stay in the slums.
> >>
> >> [End of political rant, sorry]
> >
> > Your political rant is, however, off-base. Assume for the moment that
> > the Tor folks had registered oniontld.fr for a relatively small amount of
> > money. It could have all of the attributes of .onion: you could hard-wire
> > it into local resolvers, some requests for it would leak to the DNS and
> > therefore possibly be trackable, and so on. For the purposes given in
> > draft-grothoff-iesg-special-use-p2p-names, unsquatted FQDNs would work
> > just as well as squatted TLDs.
>
> I made that point somewhat earlier (but my example was onion.eff.org or
> something).
>
> The reasonable response to my instance of that observation was that
> there's a significant deployed base of users already making use of .onion
> [1], and we don't have a time machine that we're aware of [2] to allow
> that to be fixed.
>
> Despite the enduring (and endearing, perhaps) optimism that the new gTLD
> programme would eventually bear fruit, I don't think it's unreasonable to
> think that in 2002 [3] a new gTLD wasn't really a practical option to
> choose not to take.
>
> So squatting doesn't sound right to me.

They choose to use a TLD.  There were plenty of people saying "Do
NOT use a TLD for your private namespace, use a namespace you own"
in 2002 whether it was for a protocol or a internal network.

For $20 a year or less they could have registered a name in just
about any TLD and avoided the issue.

> Joe
> 
> [1] https://metrics.torproject.org
> [2] =
> http://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/2012/07/02/stephen-hawking-time-travel_n_1=
> 643488.html
> [3] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tor_(anonymity_network)#History
-- 
Mark Andrews, ISC
1 Seymour St., Dundas Valley, NSW 2117, Australia
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