Subject: Re: [urn] URN NIDs for private enterprises

From: John C Klensin <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 04 Mar 2014 04:11:05 -0500

--On Monday, 03 March, 2014 15:36 -0500 "Dale R. Worley"
<[email-masked]> wrote:

> This is an idea that I floated in a previous message to
> urn-nid while we were discussing a NID request from a
> business.  I want to extract it and present it as a
> stand-alone message so I can get more feedback on the idea.
> I've just joined the URN mailing list, so I'm not up on the
> discussions of the revisions of the URN RFCs.  Perhaps this
> issue has been dealt with already.
> 
> The question is, "What do we do if an enterprise (business or
> other private organization) wants to have a NID of its own?"
> 
> ("Enterprise" is used as a generic term for organizations in
> RFC 2578 and the IANA registry of "private enterprise numbers"
> (https://www.iana.org/assignments/enterprise-numbers/enterpris
> e-numbers).)
> 

Dale,

For reasons that should be clear if you review the archives (or
that I'm happy to review f2f), I'm a little reluctant to
institutionalize sub-NIDs, especially sub-NID trees that are
managed by IANA rather than the registrant.  To summarize the
non-technical part, I think it would lead us down the same path
that the DNS has gone since ICANN took over, e.g., demands to
use "example." rather than "example.foo." and "example:" rather
than "
"enterprise:example:".

I'm not sure what you intend from your examples but, if there is
any hint of claiming equivalence between "enterprise:ariadne:"
and "enterprise:14490:", that is a whole different can of worms.
Use of the first would embroil IANA in the whole trademark mess
about which ICANN has given us a lot of education.  The day
someone on that side of the gap decided that enterprise names
could be profitably monetized or used in an extortion scheme..
well, we just don't want to go there.

Counter-suggestion, which keeps the process lightweight: we
break the "informal" (urn-NNNN:) URN space into blocks so that,
for example, the range from 1 - 9999 (or 1-999999 if we are
really nervous and want to be cautious) dedicated to
sequentially-assigned "informal" spaces as specified in the
current versions of 3407bis.  Values above that may be obtained
by:

(i) Obtaining an enterprise number from that IANA registry.
(ii) Requesting an informal namespace with NID
    urn: <10000 + enterprise-number>: 
or
    urn: <1000000 + enterprise-number>:
from IANA. 

That is consistent with the general informal namespace model
(and would require only a few extra sentences in 3406bis and no
change to URN-handling applications).  It just uses a second
assignment model for a different range.  IANA's URN workload for
such namespaces doesn't take it into trademark or name-ownership
territory (whatever the risks are in that area are in the
existing enterprise number registry).

An alternative with the same general theme would be to use the
entire ISO-IANA-arc private enterprise number (see either RFC
2578 or the IANA registry at
http://www.iana.org/assignments/enterprise-numbers/enterprise-numbers),
giving you an NID of
   urn-1.3.6.1.4.1.14490 
We'd have to sort out whether that syntax made sense and whether
it would be disruptive elsewhere, but, with a few lines of
additional specification, it would have the additional advantage
of allowing anyone who was offended by needing to register in a
tree associated with a US Government entity [1] could register
in another tree of their choice and, at most, notify IANA that
the URN form was going to be in use.  That eliminates the need
to split the informal space by ranges and eliminates the need
for IANA to arbitrate uniqueness in anything but its own arc.

Would that help?
    john

[1] Incorporate the entire "Internet Governance" mess, and
especially the "globalization of IANA" part (see Thursday
"Internet Governance Update" session for some pieces) by
reference.