Ted Faber wrote:
On Tue, Jul 08, 2008 at 02:17:57PM -0400, Keith Moore wrote:
The notion of a single-label fully-qualified DNS name being "valid" is
an odd one. DNS, as far as I can tell, was always intended to be
federated, both in assignment and lookup. The notion of having terminal
(basically, non NS) records at the root seems contraindicated by several
of the DNS design goals.
But there are no such non-NS records at the root. The A record for the
host hk is on the .hk servers, not the root servers.
I should have been clearer. I meant the root of the name space, not the
root zone.
And given the recent interest in vanity TLDs and ICANN's apparent lack
of willingness to run the DNS for the benefit of all, maybe it's time
for IETF to remind people that single label TLDs are not actually
supposed to work.
There are plenty of reasons to argue against using TLDs as hostnames,
but I don't think consistency with the federation/delegation model is
one.
I disagree. I think this puts more pressure on the root. It gives them
a much larger, and more varied set of "customers" to deal with, when the
root (i.e. ICANN) already has a fair amount of difficulty dealing with
the ones it has.
There's a fairly basic (if implicit) assumption of DNS (and hierarchical
names in general) that each delegation level has some shared interest
with the one above it. This shared interest helps to minimize conflicts
and (more importantly) to keep those conflicts from affecting the rest
of the net.
However, the assumption of shared interest breaks down at the root.
This has traditionally been dealt with by imposing constraints on the
root for all parties. E.g.
(a) keep the root minimal and make changes only with great care,
(b) create TLDs that group together like interests and make it obvious
where in the root a particular organization belongs (.COM, vs .ORG, vs .EDU)
(c) after .COM was captured (with various ill effects) - provide a small
number of alternative TLDs (and with multiple, competing registrars) so
that owner of a single TLD cannot impose a barrier to acquiring a domain.
Flattening the root (which is essentially what is being proposed) has
the consequence that conflicts are more likely to affect parties not
involved in the conflict.
And vanity TLDs are going to be much more attractive if people think
they can get single-label host names out of them.
Keith
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