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

[Stephane Bortzmeyer <[e-mail]>]

On Tue, Jul 14, 2015 at 09:47:43PM +0200,
 George Michaelson <[e-mail]> wrote 
 a message of 136 lines which said:

> I think this is a politically naive request, and enacts a poor
> architecture of name to locator models, and misunderstands both the
> nature of domain names in general, the DNS specifically, and the
> role of the omnibox and URL bar in a modern browser, which
> inexorably relates to calls to gethostbyname() on the contents of a
> URL.

I would love to see a more detailed analysis of the nature of DNS but,
in the mean time:

> I think it would be a mistake to proceed with .Onion, and I think
> the IESG would be well advised to re-consider the special use names
> documents, because they are a poor fit for the modern world.

The "special use names document", RFC 6761, has already been used (for
.local) and nobody objected at this time. 

> since the rest of it is political and weakly argued, many would
> chose to ignore it

No, there are practical reasons to "register" .onion:

* the forum of X.509 CAs decided to stop issuing certs for names
"unregistered" so if onion sites want to use HTTPS, they need some
form of recognition,

* the special handling by software (section 2 of the I-D) will help to
prevent leaks in the DNS (which are bad for privacy).