[urn] Re: Proposing a way forward re: GLUE and "third-party" registration

[John C Klensin <[e-mail]>]

Dale,

Thanks.  I think that, in practice, that has led you, Peter, and
myself to the same conclusion for these circumstances.  Other
circumstances might lead us to different conclusions, but we don't
have those other circumstances in front of us.

best,
   john


--On Monday, April 27, 2026 21:37 -0400 "Dale R. Worley"
<[e-mail]> wrote:

> John C Klensin <[e-mail]> writes:
>> As principles, that
>> much goes back, not just to RFC 8141, but to the discussions of
>> the mid-1990s, partially captured in RFC 1737.
> 
> Reading John's message, at this point I read RFC 1737.  From it, I
> come to a position that is different from Peter's in principle, but
> probably the same in practice.  Specifically, RFC 1737 says
> 
>    o To satisfy the requirements of uniqueness and scalability, name
>      assignment is delegated to naming authorities, who may then
> assign      names directly or delegate that authority to
> sub-authorities.      Uniqueness is guaranteed by requiring each
> naming authority to      guarantee uniqueness.  The names of the
> naming authorities      themselves are persistent and globally
> unique and top level      authorities will be centrally registered.
> 
> My interpretation of this is that it is acceptable for a URN
> registrant to incorporate an identifier space managed by a
> third-party organization.  But the key is "delegate that authority
> to
> sub-authorities" which automatically includes that the
> sub-authority has accepted the responsibilities of being a URN
> assigner.
> 
> If I stretch, I can argue that there may be some instances where the
> third-party organization has in some way committed to the public to
> respect all the needed properties of URNs, and the registrant has
> recorded a suitable citation of that commitment.  In such a case it
> could be argued that no explicit consultation between the
> registrant and the third-party organization is needed.
> 
> But I think that in the present instance, we are are not meeting
> those standards.  As a gripe about the details of the I-D, table 1
> gives for each authority identifier a URL for the associated
> specification.  But of course URLs are not expected to be
> persistent; what is needed is the *name* of the specification.  And
> to meet the requirement from RFC 1737, a (persistent!) citation
> needs to be given that the external authority has undertaken to
> satisfy the requirements for URNs.  All of this suggests that the
> vetting of the external authorities and their standards has not
> been done with sufficient rigor to support them as de-facto URN
> sub-authorities.
> 
> Dale