Re: [DNSOP] [[e-mail]: I-D Action: draft-grothoff-iesg-special-use-p2p-names-00.txt]

[Andrew Sullivan <[e-mail]>]

On Sun, Dec 01, 2013 at 12:35:44PM -0500, Paul Wouters wrote:
> 
> It would make more sense to me to reserve something like .alt where
> people can plugin onion.alt, gnu.alt, etc, and are guaranteed that
> the .alt domain will never actually be delegated by the root. 

And, behold, we have .arpa already.  We could just create anything we
wanted under there.  I don't get why some new TLD is needed.

> And once you go that way, one can wonder why not use the already
> existing .local for that? Perhaps avoid talking to different protocol
> software is a good enough reason not to re-use .local.

Certainly do not re-use .local for this.  The reason mDNS needed a
different TLD is (to drastically oversimplify) because it uses the TLD
as a protocol-shift token: when you're in .local, you're actually
using a different protocol, and this is a way to keep the otherwise
parallel name-space aligned.  (This is the fourth extension mechanism
we have in the DNS: we have RRTYPEs, CLASSes, underscore labels, and
TLDs.  Hurray!)

> The traditional reasons for not using any non-IN class is that a lot
> of software would not work well with that, but in these cases, the
> consumers aren't actually interested in real DNS anyway, and using
> a URI that indicates a different class should not be too hard to plug
> into existing browsers? 

The last such proposal was a mechanism to use a new CLASS for IDN
support.  It turned out it wouldn't work because (among other reasons)
there were too many resolvers that spit up on any CLASS other than IN.
I am dubious that has improved, though I'd be prepared for evidence
that it had.

Best,

A

-- 
Andrew Sullivan
[e-mail]