Subject: [dnsext] The Change of Authority Issue

From: Phillip Hallam-Baker <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 28 Jul 2010 16:58:20 -0400

The issue that John K. raised this morning (for me) that I had not
previously considered was the possibility that we might want aliases
to cross authority boundaries. This raises a whole new can of worms
and may be something that is undesirable regardless of implementation.

Specifically, what if someone decided that .gb should shadow .uk ?

If I am running kippers.co.uk, my mail and web servers are now going
to attempt to connect to me as kippers.co.gb as well. And that is not
something that an SMTP or HTTP server can support transparently. At a
minimum my web server needs to know to interpret Host headers
containing .co.gb.

We can argue over whether this is an issue that should be addressed in
the application layer or not. But it is certainly not something that
can be changed at the DNS level without the application layers also
being affected. At root we have the possibility that a change in the
upper level of the hierarchy that I do not control is going to affect
my systems.

And that is before we start considering the fact that .uk or .gb is a
highly loaded political question and some .uk sites would definitely
not with to use .gb as they are not and have never been associated
with Britain.

The same arguments can of course apply lower in the hierarchy. But I
am rather skeptical of the value when a real domain sells for $10/yr.

There are political/administrative reasons why wildcards do not have
effect across authority boundaries. Those should probably be borne in
mind here.

-- 
Website: http://hallambaker.com/