Subject: [Inip-discuss] More on - Re: Domain Names

From: Edward Lewis <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 20 Jan 2016 16:41:24 +0000

Part two of my catch up.

On 1/14/16, 4:17, "Inip-discuss on behalf of Olaf Kolkman"
<[email-masked] on behalf of [email-masked]> wrote:

>I lost track of the question that we are trying to answer? Ed, is there
>some underlying thing you want to arrive at? Do you want to arrive at a
>precise definition of Domain names or do you want to solve the confusion
>that arrives from identifiers
> that look like domain names?

I'm glad I read ahead, because Lyman already answered the questions in
detail, both Olaf's and Warren's.

Just to underline - my motivation (during the July'15 IETF) came from the
.onion application to be in the Special Use Domain Names registry and the
prospect for more to come.  I see a few problems in the road ahead if we
don't establish a definition of a domain name and how domain names "work."

1. If there's no definition of Domain Names, client software that needs to
resolve an identifier will (continue to) need to have an non-scaleable
approach to know how to convert an identifier to something useful (address
perhaps).  Software could recognize "onion" as special, and "local" as
special, but how many of these can software handle.

What tipped my bucket was DNS NXDOMAIN redirection services.  (I wasn't
the first to see this.)  The one my ISP uses knows "local" is special and
won't send you to the redirect page, but not so for "onion".  I'm not
defending NXDOMAIN redirection services, but they exist and could
contribute to further confusion if there's no scaleable way to manage how
names are resolved.

This is where the desire to overload resolution semantics with part of the
name comes from.  Like, if you see "onion" go to Tor and not DNS.

2. When looking at the process a "string" passes though in the ICANN
generic Top-level Domain application process (now closed), it is clear a
string/name would have to leap over many hurdles to reserved globally. The
ICANN process is tied to the DNS and there are a lot of non-techincal
forces acting on the process, but some of the process steps seemingly
apply to technically reserving a string/name.  (E.g., what if "onion" is
an insult in, say, Martian?  What if there were two separate projects
using "onion"?)

This is where the desire to define the context of Domain Names comes from
- what names are recognized as behaving "correctly" (such as not causing
confusion) and what names are truly reserved by consensus (and not just
"those in the room at the time").