Re: draft-eastlake-2606bis-00.txt: Suggestions for modifications

[Mark Andrews <Mark_Andrews@isc.org>]

> Hi,
> 
> I couldn't find any discussion of this draft on the mailing list, but the 
> draft says that it should be discussed here, so here it goes... WG chairs, 
> please rule me out of order if it isn't appropriate (and ask the author to 
> update the draft...)
> 
> draft-eastlake-2606bis-00, "Reserved Top Level DNS Names", tries to update 
> the old RFC that reserved ".test", ".example", ".invalid" and ".localhost".
> 
> RFC 2606 is a BCP, so presumably this document aims for the same status.
> 
> Summary: This is definitely not a document that I think the IETF should 
> publish as-is.
> 
> My detailed comments:
> 
> 1) I believe section 3.1  and 3.4 (reservation of "aso", "gnso", "afrinic", 
> "rfc-editor" and so on) is inappropriate for the IETF and should be 
> removed. This is ICANN's business.
> 
> Optionally, I could argue that it should be reduced to "example", so that 
> we could use "example.fr" as well as "example.com" in examples.
> 
> I am less sure about section 3.3 (prohibition of single character and two 
> letter names). There may be technical justification for these (see the RFC 
> describing the "com.com" problem, and how to fix it - the number escapes 
> me) - but I know for a fact that multiple registries do hand out two-letter 
> domain names today, and are likely to continue to do so no matter what the 
> IETF says - so this needs *heavy* justification - my default proposal would 
> be "remove".
> 
> 2) A different conversation led to the (to me) surprising conclusion that 
> there is no IETF document that conclusively states that top level domains 
> shouldn't be all numeric. I think this is an appropriate thing for the IETF 
> to state in a BCP, since 4-component all-numeric domain names are hard to 
> tell from IP addresses - a technical consideration in many protocols.

	RFC 1123 comes close.

           If a dotted-decimal number can be entered without such
           identifying delimiters, then a full syntactic check must be
           made, because a segment of a host domain name is now allowed
           to begin with a digit and could legally be entirely numeric
           (see Section 6.1.2.4).  However, a valid host name can never
           have the dotted-decimal form #.#.#.#, since at least the
           highest-level component label will be alphabetic.
 
> This could be added as a subsection of section 2 - since it's a new reason 
> for reserving TLDs.
> 
> 3) The nature of the reservation of tagged domain names (xn--) in section 
> 3.3 needs to be explained - the sentence is even grammatically incomplete.
> 
> I *think* it's intended to reserve these labels at all levels until a 
> normative interpretation is given in an IETF standard. But the para does 
> not say.
> 
> I believe there might be an IANA registry of those tags somewhere?
> If so, this should be mentioned.
> 
>                      Harald
> 
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--
Mark Andrews, ISC
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