On 28 Mar 2016, at 10:32, Suzanne Woolf wrote:
As a practical focus: sometime ago, DNSOP adopted and then parked
https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/draft-ietf-dnsop-alt-tld/. This draft
proposes a special use names registry entry that would be expected to
function as the rightmost label in names intended for resolution
outside of the DNS protocol: something of a meta-protocol switch.
Assuming we understand the problems a bit better now than we did
before, particularly given the experience of .onion, which of the
problems we've seen would be solved by telling people "You can use any
domain names you want, but the safe choice for avoiding operational
and policy collisions with DNS protocol and namespace is to root your
chosen domain name space under .alt"?
Some. For a truly well-intentioned protocol developer who wants a
"switch" name and is willing to trade likely long-term
exclusivity-of-use for slightly-clunky-naming, ".alt" works very well.
Which technical issues would persist?
If the 6761 registry is still open after putting .alt in it, all the
technical issues that there are today would remain. Different people
will feel that different technical issues are the most important ones.
For me, the biggest is "Anyone can propose to reserve a name with no
more than a technical protocol proposal, and those are easily cloned
with very minor revisions", but there are certainly other significant
technical issues as well.
If the 6761 registry is closed after adding .alt, I think there are no
more technical issues.
If, as some people have argued, the only problem we really have here
is separating domain names that might be used in the DNS from domain
names available for use in other resolution contexts, it may be that
".alt" is both necessary and sufficient to support future experiment
and development in the use of domain names.
Will that do it? If not, why not?
It could do it, but only if the 6761 registry is closed. If the registry
is still open, and the only bar is an Internet-Draft that could gain
"consensus" after wearing down opponents, the 6761 route will remain
attractive to those who are willing to spend their time (and the time of
everyone in the IETF consensus process) to "get" a name.
On 28 Mar 2016, at 11:53, John Levine wrote:
Which technical issues would persist?
I can think of two, plus one non-technical one.
The first technical one is whether there is a registry for .alt names
and if so how it'd operate. From prior discussion, some people think
it should be FCFS to prevent ambiguity. I think that would be utterly
counterproductive since it'd lead to a squatter rush, and anyway
there's no way to enforce that people use names they've registered.
FCFS with unlimited name collisions would be OK, to help people figure
out where to get the code to implement various name things they've
come across.
That's not really a technical issue with the draft because the draft
says:
There is no IANA controlled
registry for names under the ALT TLD - it is an unmanaged namespace,
and developers are responsible for dealing with any collisions that
may occur under .alt. Informal lists of namespaces under .alt may
appear to assist the developer community.
The other, which is a can of worms, is whether we want to define
protocol switches. At this point, there's an implicit switch used for
.local at the DNS level, where you give it a name and it returns an IP
address that might have come from an A or AAAA record or might have
come from somewhere else. And there's another higher level one at the
socket level used for .onion, where you give it a name and it gives
you back an open socket that might be a TCP or UDP connection to an
addresss found in an A or AAAA record, or it might be something else.
If there's to be any hope that people could use more than one of these
hacks at a time, a protocol switch would be a big help.
Again, that's not really a technical issue with the draft because the
draft is completely silent on that.
Finally, no matter what we do, at some point someone will come by with
.GARLIC which is like .ONION but stronger and they will say (with some
justification) that it's used by a zillion people around the world.
"You should have used GARLIC.ALT." "Yeah, I guess so, but we didn't,
sorry." Then we'll have to deal with it one way or the other. I hope
that .alt will push that day off farther into the future but it's
unlikely to push it to infinity.
Fully agree. That's why, when thinking about .alt, we need to consider
two different cases:
- Add .alt to the 6761 registry
- Add .alt to the 6761 registry and close the registry
To me, the second gives a much clearer picture to both the IETF
community about what they will be expected to do in the future, and to
the developers who want new outside-the-DNS name switches.
--Paul Hoffman
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