Re: [DNSOP] On squatting and draft-grothoff-iesg-special-use-p2p-names

[Andrew Sullivan <[e-mail]>]

On Mon, Jan 06, 2014 at 01:48:04PM -0500, Ted Lemon wrote:
> It seems to me that TOR is a pretty vital application, even if it's
> not as popular as .local (which, let's be honest, is almost never
> seen, much less typed, by an end user). 

   Addresses in ".onion" are opaque, non-mnemonic, alpha-semi-numeric
   hashes corresponding to an 80-bit truncated SHA1 hash over a given
   Tor hidden service's public key. 

I'm pretty sure things in .onion are never supposed to be seen, much
less typed, by an end user too.

> I am deeply skeptical of
> the idea that the only relevant factor here is how widespread the
> squatting is on a particular top-level special-use domain.

I have never suggested that's the only relevant factor.  But I have
suggested that the argument, "This needs to be a TLD that steps on the
standard ICANN allocation mecahnism because it's already widely
deployed," needs some evidence of that wide deployment.  In the case
of .onion, for instance, it is very far from obvious to me that the
name needed to have been allocated directly beneath the root (as
opposed to, say, inside .arpa); but if Tor is already widely deployed,
the argument in favour of allocating that string in the root due to
practical side effects is made stronger.

Best regards,

A

-- 
Andrew Sullivan
[e-mail]