Subject: [salud] Domain names as <provider> values

From: [email-masked] (Dale R. Worley)
Date: Tue, 20 May 2014 16:15:52 -0400

[as an author]

Let's look at the going back to using only domain names as <provider>
values.

Barry Lieba suggests that we can get that version of the proposal
approved by the URN people.

Revising the text will be straightforward.

In a sense, using bare domain names is no different than using domain
names qualified with dates:  The person who defines a new private-name
must be aware of the private-names that have previously been created
using the same provider value.

The advantage of date-qualified providers is that an organization that
has just acquired a domain name can create a provider value using
today's date, and that provider is guaranteed to not have yet been
used to create a private-name, because it cannot have been used before
today.

On the other hand, it is not difficult to acquire a domain name that
has not been used before.  I did DNS searches for random domain names
under .COM.  It turns out that most 4-letter domain names have been
registered, but very few of the 5-letter domain names (as a proportion
of the total number that are possible) have been registered.  I looked
at random domain names under .DE and got similar results.  (I chose
.DE because it is the most popular two-letter TLD that I know of that
allows second-level names to be registered.)  So if an organization
wants a short, new domain name to register to use for private-names,
they can probably construct one from some abbreviation of their
company's name.

Dale

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From: Paul Kyzivat <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 20 May 2014 19:06:16 -0400

> using the same provider value.

This is the main part that gives me heartburn.
*How* will the new owner of the domain be aware of names created by the 
prior owner(s)?

If the new owner acquires the business of the old owner then it may be 
reasonable to expect that it could learn this.

But when the old owner simply ceased paying to own the name, perhaps 
because it went out of business, then the new owner may have no avenue 
to discover the old private-names.

For that matter, since private names don't need to be published, it is 
possible for a company that continues to own the domain to "forget" the 
private-names it has minted. Perhaps the department that did it was axed.

In practice I am quite certain that what we *really* expect is that most 
private names will be *very* private, and that they will fall out of use 
when the owner disappears. Collisions will be rare, and unimportant if 
they do occur.

Perhaps we would be better off with just a FCFS registry with expert 
review, and perhaps an encouragement to put your organization identity 
into the ids you mint.

	Thanks,
	Paul

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From: [email-masked] (Dale R. Worley)
Date: Wed, 21 May 2014 15:27:36 -0400

> From: Paul Kyzivat <[email-masked]>

> when the owner disappears. Collisions will be rare, and unimportant if 

What I expect is that (at least in initial use) private names will be
used only between PBX switches and phones made by a particular vendor.
So they'll be public in the sense that they will appear in the
documentation for the PBXs, but they'll be private in the sense that
they won't appear in inter-organization traffic.

For provider values, there doesn't seem to be a solution that meets
all the requirements we'd like.

Dale