Re: Last Call: <draft-ietf-dnsop-onion-tld-00.txt> (The .onion Special-Use Domain Name) to Proposed Standard

["John Levine" <[e-mail]>]

>​I believe that .onion is, essentially, a way for structuring protocol
>addresses so that they appear to be DNS names.  It does not conform to the
>delegation model of the DNS, and it requires special knowledge on the part
>of the handler to understand it. ...

Right, that's why it's a special use name.  As others have noted, one
reason to regisiter it as special use is to deter hijacking if the
names leak into the real DNS.  The other is for bureaucratic reasons
related to SSL CAs.  Those seem reasonably compelling to me.

We had a long discussion about the perverse incentives that this might
create for other people to invent other names.  Yes, they might, but
this is engineering rather than art, and we need to deal with things
as they are, not as we might prefer they should have been.

R's,
John