On Mon, Mar 28, 2016 at 08:49:01PM -0700, David Conrad wrote: > > On Mar 28, 2016, at 8:36 PM, Andrew Sullivan <a...@anvilwalrusden.com> wrote: > > But I think you're smuggling into your argument a claim that > > they're potentially subject to the IPR and socio-economic issues that > > have been a problem in the DNS root and TLD zones. That's in effect > > an argument that the special-names registrations are not special. I > > do not agree with that claim. > > Just to be clear, you believe that the IESG putting a name onto the special > names registry means that it will then be immune from IPR and socio-economic > issues? >
I don't see how that is implied by what I wrote. Apologies that this is so long, but given your question it's plain I haven't made myself clear when keeping the message short. The IPR and socio-economic issues with respect to the DNS root and TLDs arise within a context. Part of that context involves the fact that, in many cases, DNS names appear in URIs and on the sides of busses as approximately-Internet-wide identifiers and so on. This makes DNS label string similarity with trademark-law word marks a hot issue for trademark lawyers. (Early in ICANN's history, several policies were adopted that implicitly accepted such IPR claims. But it is irrelevant that ICANN currently has such policies or when or how they arose, because they are in all cases founded in the use-in-public nature of DNS names given the way certain pieces of user-accessible identifiers, including email addresses and the host portion of URIs, work on the Internet.) The special-use names registry contains, so far, three kinds of names. Some names are for special use within a DNS context. Examples include example.com., invalid., and tld. These are all expected to appear in DNS contexts, and are generally expected not to resolve in a global DNS sense. There are also special names that do resolve in a global context, but that have only local meaning. The reverse trees for RFC 1918 addresses and localhost. are of this sort. The third kind is different, however, because it presents a mechanism which is, in effect, instructions to the agent attempting the resolution to use a different technology. So, for instance, names terminating in local. are not properly speaking candidates for lookup in the global DNS _at all_. They're intended to be used in other contexts (mDNS names, for instance, are more likely to be encountered in pick lists). It is not at all clear that these names are really approximately-Internet-wide identifiers. The only worked example we have of this recently is onion, which betokens that a name is for lookup and use in the context of onion routing and otherwise probably shouldn't be. This technical difference _makes_ a difference for what sorts of IPR claims could be introduced against such names. Naturally, there could be IPR or socio-economic issues associated, but they're not the same ones as are raised in the DNS and in keeping with prevailing ICANN policies. (By way of analogy, certain large Internet Exchanges in the US and extremely remote parts of the developing world both have "a bandwidth problem", but trying to tackle them as though they were the same thing would be to make a gross category mistake.) It will do us no good at all to attempt to collapse these different kinds of problems into a single category, which is why I don't accept Alain's claim that a name is a name. Now, some appear to be arguing that we _could_ get an application for a case that would test the distinctions I make above. To that claim I respond that we'd need evidence that we have such a problem. So far, all I've heard is "what if?". If we want to attend to things the IETF is bad at, solving logically possible problems we don't actually have instantiated is higher on my list than dealing with social and economic pressure. Best regards, A -- Andrew Sullivan a...@anvilwalrusden.com _______________________________________________ DNSOP mailing list DNSOP@ietf.org https://www.ietf.org/mailman/listinfo/dnsop
