Re: I'm back (finally)

["Charles Lindsey" <[e-mail]>]

In <[e-mail]> Harald Tveit Alvestrand <[e-mail]> writes:

>The feedback I got (not official) was that the 1123 oblique reference was 
>the closest we have come to an official statement; I got one comment saying 
>that at the time Jon Postel was IANA, he said quite clearly that "there 
>will never be a numeric TLD". But I've not managed to find a policy 
>document that says so.

I think all we can do is to proceed on the assumption that John Postel was
correct.

>I've pushed on the dnsext list for the prohibition to be added to 
>draft-eastlake-2606bis, but that hasn't happened so far... meeting some 
>resistance, mostly of the "not the IETF's business" type.

I would have thought it was very much the IETF's business if every IP
address in the traditional form ("123.456.123.456") could also be
potentially a domain-name. I am sure there are lots of existing things
that would break if that were ever to be allowed.

There is currently a guidance statement from ICANN, that I unearthed in
the IANA website, that says ".example" and the like should not be TLDs. I
suppose persuading ICANN to include a remark about numeric TLDs would
resolve the issue (I gather it is already too late to prevent numeric
components at lower levels).

-- 
Charles H. Lindsey ---------At Home, doing my own thing------------------------
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