Re: [I18ndir] I18ndir early review of draft-schanzen-gns-10

[John Levine <[e-mail]>]

It appears that Christian Grothoff  <[e-mail]> said:
>On 6/30/22 21:10, Asmus Freytag wrote:
>> On 3/7/2022 10:45 AM, Schanzenbach, Martin wrote:
>>> This makes it explicit that GNS names cannot be distinguished from DNS names (or special-use tlds, or any other domain name for that matter).
>>> It also addresses the issue of potential leakage of names in another system.
>>> Note that is leakage issue is generally a problem also for special-use names (e.g. .onion, .bit etc) but it makes sense to highlight it I think.
>> 
>> I thought that .onion etc are actually reserved names so there's no 
>> confusion with DNS.
>> 
>> Or did I misread your paragraph.
>
>Not exactly, mostly I think you're missing out on history: .onion is 
>reserved _because_ we proposed that it should be. However, we proposed 6 
>TLDs to be reserved, and ultimately Facebook pushed ".onion" through 
>while all the others were rejected by our corporate overlords ...

Well, that's one view. The other is that .onion is in far wider use
than any of the GNS names and had and has far broader support, and there
was a concrete problem with issuing .onion SSL certificates.  Facebook
had no more to do with it than any other large company that might have
a few people coming to IETF meetings.

To return to the original question, it's true that .onion is supposed
to be special cased but a lot of DNS client software doesn't do that
and it leaks into the public DNS.  If software doesn't treat GNS
names as special case, that may be a problem for GNS but it's not
a problem for us.

R's,
John