Re: Use of "unassigned" in IANA registries

[Phillip Hallam-Baker <[e-mail]>]

On Tue, Jan 18, 2011 at 2:46 AM, Lars Eggert <[e-mail]> wrote:

> Hi,
>
> On 2011-1-17, at 1:23, Phillip Hallam-Baker wrote:
> > If people think that IANA is a tool they can use to impose their own
> > personal political agenda on the Internet, they are mistaken.
>
> that isn't the point of this thread.
>
> The point of IANA assignment is to avoid conflicting codepoint usage.
> Squatting on codepoints defeats this goal.
>

But it meets the goal of the people squatting. Is there any reason to think
that changing the name of the code points is going to make a difference?


I know of about 5 or so TCP option numbers that are being squatted on at the
> moment (there are likely more). I've been in discussion with the folks who
> are squatting, and in all cases the story was either "we were going to ask
> for assignment but it got forgotten" or "oh, you mean unassigned doesn't
> mean it's free for the taking?"
>

Those sound like excuses to me rather than reasons.

I am currently applying for a DNS RR code assignment. More than one person
involved suggested that we should just assign the RR code ourselves by fiat
because they didn't want to wait six weeks for a review.

My name is on the draft so we have applied for an assignment. But now that
six weeks have passed we have a major industry meeting next week that is to
discuss the proposal (amongst others) as part of a DNSSEC deployment effort
and there has been no response.


Using a term other than "unassigned" might prevent some instances of the
> latter.


I don't see how changing the name is going to affect behavior for the
positive here. If you do succeed in confusing people as to which numbers are
unassigned and which are not it is going to increase the risk of a
collision.


If five people are experimenting with TCP options and this is not causing
collisions, what is the problem?


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Website: http://hallambaker.com/