Re: draft RFC to describe a URN for DTS audio

[[e-mail] (Dale R. Worley)]

Thanks for your recent thoughts.  Here are some more of my thoughts.
They are not organized into a particular proposal, but I think may
provide a guide to obtaining useful results.

I am having some difficulty orienting myself as to how to look at your
proposal.  One issue is that your proposal is (or at least appears to
be) completely commercial.  I don't think that is intrinsically bad,
but it is *different* from other namespace proposals.  And I think
that other people will see your proposal as *different* for the same
reason.

Backing up, I see that you would like a "formal" URN namespace, one
with a nice name, and not a "urn-<number>" name.  (RFC 3406)  That
makes sense to me.  But that does mean that the IESG will have to
approve the proposal as an RFC.  So there's a question of whether the
IESG will raise the questions that I am discussing.

I see a number of issues deriving from DTS's purely commercial status:

- There is an intention of commercial benefit, and less of a position
  of public benefit.

I don't see this as important, since many namespace assignments are
delegations to industry consortia.  The consortia are usually
non-profit, but their members are definitely businesses.

- Because the registrant is a business, it would be desirable if the
  delegation was done under a policy that was explicitly even-handed
  toward all businesses that might want a delegation.

- There are a *lot* of potential business registrants, leading to the
  possibility of "NID pollution", filling the registry with names to
  the point that new names that are meaningful would be difficult to
  assign.

- Businesses will likely desire an NID based on the business' name,
  making it harder to resolve conflicts regarding desired NIDs.

It seems to me that a good way to address these issues is to create a
single NID whose sub-NIDs are delegated to businesses.

At this point, let me use the term "enterprise" instead of "business".
"Enterprise" is used as a generic term for organizations in RFC 2578
and the IANA registry of "private enterprise numbers"
(https://www.iana.org/assignments/enterprise-numbers/enterprise-numbers).

I can see at least three ways to handle all enterprises in a
systematic way:

- urn:enterprise:<enterprise-number>:<NSS>

This technique uses the existing private enterprise numbers to
identify the enterprise.

- urn:enterprise:<identifier>:<NSS>

This technique would create a new registry, from which enterprises
would allocate identifiers on a first-come basis.  The syntax of
<identifier> would probably be the same as <NID> in RFC 2141.

- urn:enterprise:<domain-name>:<NSS>

This technique uses the enterprise's domain name.  (There are a bunch
of details that are needed to make domain names permanent.  See
draft-ietf-salud-alert-info-urns-11 for how to do it.)

Using my consulting company (Ariadne Internet Services) as an example,
these techniques would produce:

- urn:enterprise:14490:nss

- urn:enterprise:ariadne:nss

- urn:enterprise:ariadne.com:nss, or
  urn:enterprise:ariadne.com(2012-01-01):nss

Perhaps this concept has been discussed in the URN working group and
they have already come to a decision.

Dale