[DNSOP] Strong objection to draft-wkumari-dnsop-alt-tld-04

[Stephane Bortzmeyer <[e-mail]>]

On Thu, Feb 12, 2015 at 02:36:39PM +0800,
 Andrew Sullivan <[e-mail]> wrote 
 a message of 20 lines which said:

> Warren and I have prepared draft-wkumari-dnsop-alt-tld-04.  We'd
> appreciate feedback.  If there isn't any, maybe that's a sign that
> we could just publish it and thereby create a special TLD in which
> people could set up their various special use special names?

This is a bad idea and should be dropped completely.

The main reason why I say so is that we already have RFC 6761 and it
exists precisely to register special names. I was not a big fan of
this RFC (that's an understatement) but, now that it exists, I see no
reason to obsolete it after only two years of existence and only one
TLD, an Apple's one, registered. Worse, draft-wkumari-dnsop-alt-tld-04
misrepresents RFC 6761 by saying things like "Special Use TLDs which
should only be used in exceptional circumstances" while it is never
written in RFC 6761.

Other reasons:

* existing code will not be modified and the names in
draft-grothoff-iesg-special-use-p2p-names will have to be considered
anyway. So, .ALT adds work for dnsop / the IESG without addressing the
existing requests (.ONION, .GNU, .IP2P, etc).

* the draft is confused in terminology between "domain name" and "DNS
name". There is no such thing as a "DNS name". Domain names can be
looked up in the DNS but they are used in many different contexts and
can be resolved by several protocols. If someone sets up a RDAP server
for Namecoin, names in .BIT or .COM will use the same protocol for
information retrieval.

* the draft uses terms like "pseudo-TLD" which are uselessy
deprecative.

* .ALT claims to be registered under the RFC 6761 framework but the
draft ignores the requirments of its section 5.