First of all the process had a list of strings that one could not apply
for. So first question is how IETF do believe that list is to be
created. By IETF? By ICANN? In cooperation?
In the current round, ICANN published this list of forbidden names on
pages 2-9 and 2-10 of the AGB. I have to say was rather peculiar:
AFRINIC ALAC APNIC ARIN ASO CCNSO EXAMPLE GAC GNSO GTLD-SERVERS IAB
IANA IANA-SERVERS ICANN IESG IETF INTERNIC INVALID IRTF ISTF LACNIC
LOCAL LOCALHOST NIC NRO RFC-EDITOR RIPE ROOT-SERVERS RSSAC SSAC TEST
TLD WHOIS WWW
They also reserved translations of TEST and EXAMPLE into an
unspecified set of other languages.
TEST, EXAMPLE, INVALID, LOCAL, and LOCALHOST are ours, for the rest I can
mostly guess where they came from, but I don't know and nobody else seems
to, either. (What's ISTF?)
On page 2-11, there's two additional lists of names related to the
International Olympic Committee and the Red Cross. I understand the
political reasoning (they're not trademarks because they belong to
international treaty organizations rather than businesses) but I don't
understand why those two treaty orgs and not a hundred others got
their names special cased beyond the practical fact that these two
complained louder.
I certainly don't want the IETF to get involved in whatever processes
produced those lists.
I think personally IETF should help creating the initial black list.
Before applicants do send in the strings they want.
We can try, but I think the chances are high that we would spend a
great deal of time arguing about the list, then later would find that
we'd missed a few that someone applied for.
Also, it's a moving target. In 2009, .BELKIN was one of the top 10
bogus requests, but nobody was thinking about .ONION. Now it's
possible that most of the old leaky Belkin routers have been retired,
but I don't know, and I don't know a good way to find out. There's
the annual DITL snapshots of root traffic, but they're just once a
year, not really comparable from year to year, and there is some
reason to think (papers at the Verisign collision workshop in London
earlier this year) that some of the traffic varies cyclically over a
month or even a quarter so a one day snapshot could miss it.
Regards,
John Levine, johnl(_at_)taugh(_dot_)com, Taughannock Networks, Trumansburg NY
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