Subject: draft-eastlake-2606bis-00.txt: Suggestions for modifications

From: Harald Tveit Alvestrand <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 20 Oct 2005 12:55:36 +0200

Hi,

I couldn't find any discussion of this draft on the mailing list, but the 
draft says that it should be discussed here, so here it goes... WG chairs, 
please rule me out of order if it isn't appropriate (and ask the author to 
update the draft...)

draft-eastlake-2606bis-00, "Reserved Top Level DNS Names", tries to update 
the old RFC that reserved ".test", ".example", ".invalid" and ".localhost".

RFC 2606 is a BCP, so presumably this document aims for the same status.

Summary: This is definitely not a document that I think the IETF should 
publish as-is.

My detailed comments:

1) I believe section 3.1  and 3.4 (reservation of "aso", "gnso", "afrinic", 
"rfc-editor" and so on) is inappropriate for the IETF and should be 
removed. This is ICANN's business.

Optionally, I could argue that it should be reduced to "example", so that 
we could use "example.fr" as well as "example.com" in examples.

I am less sure about section 3.3 (prohibition of single character and two 
letter names). There may be technical justification for these (see the RFC 
describing the "com.com" problem, and how to fix it - the number escapes 
me) - but I know for a fact that multiple registries do hand out two-letter 
domain names today, and are likely to continue to do so no matter what the 
IETF says - so this needs *heavy* justification - my default proposal would 
be "remove".

2) A different conversation led to the (to me) surprising conclusion that 
there is no IETF document that conclusively states that top level domains 
shouldn't be all numeric. I think this is an appropriate thing for the IETF 
to state in a BCP, since 4-component all-numeric domain names are hard to 
tell from IP addresses - a technical consideration in many protocols.

This could be added as a subsection of section 2 - since it's a new reason 
for reserving TLDs.

3) The nature of the reservation of tagged domain names (xn--) in section 
3.3 needs to be explained - the sentence is even grammatically incomplete.

I *think* it's intended to reserve these labels at all levels until a 
normative interpretation is given in an IETF standard. But the para does 
not say.

I believe there might be an IANA registry of those tags somewhere?
If so, this should be mentioned.

                     Harald

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