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

[Paul Hoffman <[e-mail]>]

On Feb 3, 2014, at 7:19 AM, Stephane Bortzmeyer <[e-mail]> wrote:

> On Thu, Jan 30, 2014 at 11:45:30AM +1100,
> Mark Andrews <[e-mail]> wrote 
> a message of 74 lines which said:
> 
>> The squatted tld's used by software .onion, .bit etc could be
>> migrated to a new namespaces.
> 
> :-)
> 
> "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.

--Paul Hoffman