Paul,

On Aug 13, 2022, at 3:32 PM, Paul Vixie <[email protected]> 
wrote:
> i suggest that we adopt the technology "domain names (which is a concept that 
> precedes DNS itself)" whenever we are trying to talk about the name space as 
> distinct from the protocol.

Sorry, which technology are you suggesting we adopt?  Or did you get 
auto-corrected from “terminology”?

> ideally the domain name system would have left a carve-out for domain names 
> that were not expected to be served through the first such "domain name 
> system", but were rather reserved for future domain name systems.

The domain name namespace (labels separated by dots) is obviously agnostic to 
how it is implemented. The problem isn’t that parts of the namespace can’t be 
reserved: anything can be reserved for anything, regardless of protocol (see 
.ONION or .LOCAL).  The problem is that every resolver implementation and 
deployment on the Internet, which assumes anything that looks like a domain 
name IS intended for the DNS, has to be modified to “do something different” 
when it sees that reservation and failure to do so mean the name is going to be 
looked up via the DNS.

> by camping onto the whole of the domain name space, DNS (the domain name 
> system) has blocked research into new naming systems.

It didn’t block research into overloading the domain name namespace into 
protocols other than DNS (as Onion, mDNS, GNS, Namecoin, Handshake, Butterfly, 
etc., all demonstrate), it made it unscalable because of conventions of 
operating system vendors and application developers and assumptions of users.

> warren's .ALT proposal can begin to undo that harm. internet standards should 
> describe roads not walls. i am no fan of blockchain naming, but i'd like 
> those systems to reach the market rather than be prevented from doing so.


Just to be clear: you believe folks like Handshake, Butterfly, Unstoppable 
Domains, etc., will be willing to be ghettoized into .ALT (or other)?  And you 
also believe this will allow the use of (say) UD.ALT or HANDSHAKE.ALT to 
address the markets they’re trying to address? I’m not against moving forward 
with .ALT, but I’ll admit some skepticism that it will work as intended: it 
feels to me that it’s more an exercise in “if you build it, they will come” but 
without James Earl Jones.

As John Levine points out, this isn’t a technology issue: it is 
social/politica/economic/bureaucratic. Folks (understandably) want to leverage 
THE (singular) Internet’s namespace for fun or profit but existing processes at 
ICANN make this unappealing/impossible. As a result they (understandably) are 
looking to do an end run around those processes.  However, those processes were 
established by an entity outside of the IETF with a very different composition 
than that which participates in the IETF for very good reasons. If the IETF 
were to provide a way to bypass the ICANN processes (as Rubens points out, yet 
another beauty contest: yay), I’d be quite surprised if the myriad 
social/politica/economic/bureaucratic issues faced by ICANN wouldn’t come along 
for the ride. What’s the IETF’s legal budget again?

Regards,
-drc

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