Subject: IESG Statement on RFC3406 and URN Namespaces Registry Review

From: IESG Secretary <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 27 Feb 2008 09:29:02 -0800 (PST)

RFC 3406: URN Namespace Definitions
Registry: http://www.iana.org/assignments/urn-namespaces
Issue: Review processes and criteria

The guidelines in RFC3406 on the requirements for registering new
formal namespaces include several review steps (these do not apply to
namespaces other than formal namespaces):
- Review on the [email-masked] (now [email-masked])
- Expert review on behalf of IANA
- IETF Consensus including IETF Last Call and IESG Evaluation

The RFC also provides a list of considerations that might be used in
review by all these parties. The considerations in section 4.3 only
apply to formal namespaces:
- Benefit to some community (Section 4.3)
- How a general Internet user may use the namespace, including open
assignment of identifiers and open operation of resolution servers if
applicable (Section 4.3)
- Uniqueness guarantees (Appendix A)
- Persistence guarantees (Appendix A)

Since formal namespaces are often assigned to organizations that make
assignments within the namespace, and the organization may add new
sub-namespaces and functionality in the future, reviewers of URN
Namespace applications cannot directly verify benefit, openness,
uniqueness and persistence. Reviewers can only look at the
organization's assurances that they will make assignments with those
benefits or guarantees. Given the review that URN namespace
applications already get, the current policy of the IESG is to follow
the advice of the expert reviewer on approving such namespace
applications.

The IESG suggests that a change to RFC3406 to reduce the overhead of
these namespace applications might also be desirable.
_______________________________________________
IETF-Announce mailing list
[email-masked]
https://www.ietf.org/mailman/listinfo/ietf-announce