[regext] Benjamin Kaduk's Discuss on draft-ietf-regext-org-ext-09: (with DISCUSS and COMMENT)

Benjamin Kaduk <kaduk@mit.edu> Tue, 23 October 2018 19:13 UTC

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Subject: [regext] Benjamin Kaduk's Discuss on draft-ietf-regext-org-ext-09: (with DISCUSS and COMMENT)
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Benjamin Kaduk has entered the following ballot position for
draft-ietf-regext-org-ext-09: Discuss

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DISCUSS:
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I have two points that I would like to discuss.  It is more likely than not
that at least one of them merely reflects my confusion and is a non-issue,
but I would like to get these at least clarified.

First, the examples throughout the document use organization identifiers
like "myreseller" or "myproxy".  This seems to me to be highly confusing,
since these IDs are supposed to be server-unique values per organization,
and are highly unlikely to be "my" reseller/proxy/etc. for all the entries
in the registry.  If I understand things correctly, the example IDs should
instead be company-name-like values or "random" numbers or similar (or
combination thereof).

Second, I am unsure of the semantics relating to role types, especially as
they interact with the <update> command.  Various aspects of the examples
seem to imply that it is only permitted to have at most one organization
mapping of a given role type (i.e., one reseller, one proxy, etc.).  In
particular, the <orgext:chg> element seems to be using the <orgext:id> role
attribute to determine which <orgext:id> is being changed (with the new
value being provided in the element body), and the <orgext:rem> element is
providing <orgext:id> with only the role attribute and no body to identify
a specific organization to remove.  If this reading of the document is
correct, then I would expect the limitation to be called out more clearly,
especially as it would seem to prevent a domain owner from (e.g.) using
multiple DNS service operators.


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COMMENT:
----------------------------------------------------------------------

Section 1

   In the business model of domain registration, we usually have 3 roles
   of entities: a registrant, a registrar and a registry.  There may be
   other roles of entities involved in the domain registration process
   which are not formally defined, such as resellers, DNS service
   operators, privacy proxies, etc.

nit: Perhaps I am misreading, but are we not going to formally define these
entities in the next paragraph (in which case "yet" might be worth adding)?

   An organization mapping object defined in [ID.draft-ietf-regext-org]
   SHOULD be created first.  The organization information specified in
   this document MUST reference the existing organization identifier.

What does "first" refer to?  "prior to the use of that object"?

Section 2

   The XML namespace prefix "orgext" is used, but implementations MUST
   NOT depend on it and instead employ a proper namespace-aware XML
   parser and serializer to interpret and output the XML documents.

[This could probably be written more clearly; see my comment on the
companion document]

Section 9

IIRC the authorization model for EPP does not allow arbitrary clients to
retrieve information about arbitrary (unrelated) domains.  If that's not
the case, there would be privacy considerations with respect to exposing
the linkages of the organization mappings (and roles).