Re: [DNSOP] [EXT] Re: draft-schanzen-gns and draft-ietf-dns-alt-tld

[Paul Wouters <[e-mail]>]

On Aug 8, 2022, at 02:08, Christian Huitema <[e-mail]> wrote:
> 
> 
> 
> The name space is "almost" unitary. People deploy things like domain suffix search lists so that users can type "mailserver" and arrive at "mailserver.corp.example.com" --

That use is basically dead. It might sort of work at an enterprise or university but try typing in a single word in any browser and it will “smartly” turn it into a search engine key word.


>> If GNS is glued into DNS as a sub-arc over a label we understand, the
>> possibility of some unity, fusion of purpose exists. If it squats, or
>> is pushed aside, then that possibility disappears.

Again, if they were okay with such names, they would have already picked ._gns or something. Alternative schemes want the same easy mnemonics as regular DNS.

>> 
>> If users could be trained to type "!example.pet" or "..example.pet" to explicitly require resolution of a GNS name, then John's proposal would work. I am not sure that this can such training would work.

For one, I don’t think it works. Second, if !bigbank.com can end up at an alternative entity that is not bigbank, we have a new problem that the IETF and ICANN have very valid reasons for to try and prevent - it would harm the security and stability of the internet.

 Having an alternative namespace is similar to DNS having classes. We could have had these and then GNS could have been a class. But the billions of internet users think of the namespace as one thing - you can’t overload it via classes or clever nerdy character prefixes.


>> Now, it may well be that training users to type "example.pet.arpa" or "example.test" is just as hard. Design proper user interactions is hard. I would much rather let the GNS developers make these decisions rather than have the IETF try to engineer user interactions on their behalf. If they have concluded that they just need a name suffix, I think we should take that at face value.

From an end user point of view, a different app would be more understandable, eg how @foo has come to mean the twitter or Instagram username namespace. But that process was the reverse of what GNS is attempting (app->namespace, not namespace->app)

Paul