[Originally submitted Monday but with my ICANN email address, so it apparently
didn’t get distributed to the IETF list.]
John, et al,
There are a substantial number of ICANN people at this IETF meeting, including,
of course, the usual IANA team, three of ICANN’s to level managers — David
Conrad, Chief Technology Officer, Ashwin Rangun, Chief Innovation and
Information Officer, and Akram Atallah, president of the Global Domains
Division — several people on David Conrad’s team, and four people on the ICANN
board, including, of course, the IETF liaison to the ICANN board, Jonne
Soininen, and Suzanne Woolf, who serves multiply as the liaison to the ICANN
board from the root server operators group, RSSAC, chair of DNSOP, and a member
of the IAB. ICANN is paying a LOT of attention.
Speaking for myself and not necessarily for the ICANN board or the rest of the
organization, it seems evident that the nice clean separation of name spaces
originally envisioned via the distinct indicators in DNS, e.g. “IN” for
“Internet”, protocol identifiers in URLs, etc. has not worked out in practice.
The original scheme of assigning just seven “generic” top level domains plus
two letter country code TLDs meant the rest of the top level space was left
unassigned. Nature apparently abhors a vacuum in this area as well as in the
physical domain. Various vendors grabbed unused names such as local, corp,
mail and built then into their products. In principle, these names should not
have shown up in queries to the DNS root; in practice they have shown up in
great numbers. Developers of new protocols have also felt comfortable using
previously unused top level names, with onion being the example getting the
most attention right now, but with several others previously used and more to
come.
Meanwhile, one of the goals included in ICANN’s formation was increasing
competition and choice. (Don’t blame me; I wasn’t involved at the time.) The
first result was the creation of the registrar system, which resulted in a
dramatic drop in the price of domain names. The second result, which has taken
quite a bit longer, was the opening up of the top level domain space, which
brings us to where we are today.
Irrespective of the original intent to keep various name spaces separate, I
think we have to accept that these name spaces bleed into each other. Once we
accept that, to me, fairly obvious fact of life, the next step is to work out
some straightforward coordination between the IETF’s processes and ICANN’s
processes. I don’t see why it should be hard or lengthy to do so.
Steve
David Conrad’s technical team, Akram Attalah
On Jul 21, 2015, at 11:30 AM, John C Klensin <john-ietf(_at_)jck(_dot_)com>
wrote:
--On Monday, July 20, 2015 19:22 +0000 John Levine
<johnl(_at_)taugh(_dot_)com> wrote:
Now that you and Andrew have pointed it out, and after today's
dnsop session, I agree that the trickle of not-DNS domain
names is likely only to become larger, and we need a better
way to deal with it than a two-month all-IETF debate per name.
yep. But I think the other part is even more important.
why can't we take the Special Names
problem to them, say "look, we understand that these names
look like names in the public DNS root and that confusion
that would have bad effects is a real risk, how about you
devise a procedure for dealing with them that recognizes the
importance of existing deployment and use and considers the
low likelihood that people who are using these names will
stop because you tell them too. Clearly the procedure you
use for new gTLD applications won't work. And, because some
of these names won't wait, if you can't get that procedure
together immediately, we'd be willing to let you delegate
things to us on some reasonable basis until you do."
That is an excellent question, and I suppose it couldn't hurt
to ask. But I have little confidence that ICANN in anything
like its current form, where it is dominated by people who
want to collect rent on every imaginable TLD, would come up
with an answer any better than let them pay $185K and take
their chances.
John, I think many of us have developed very low expectations of
ICANN and, as you certainly know, the situation you describe
above (often known as "capture") is only one of the problems.
One result is that there have been a lot of decisions in recent
years that start from "if we let them near that, they will mess
it up and/or figure out a way to turn it into a profit center"
and then moves to some sort of workaround. The difficulty with
that approach is that it lets them off the hook and, in the long
term, may make things ever worse. I've become convinced that is
the wrong approach. The alternative is to treat them like the
responsible stewards of the DNS root namespace that they claim
to be. If they screw it up, we (preferably as individuals and
external organizations and with help from ISOC and the press,
not the IETF) hold them accountable in the court of public
opinion and ridicule (not their pre-captured "accountability"
mechanisms). Of they step up -- which I don't think is
impossible-- we make real progress.
best,
john