[dns-operations] dotless domains

[David Conrad]

Stephane,

On Sep 21, 2012, at 1:40 AM, Stephane Bortzmeyer <bortzmeyer at nic.fr> wrote:
>>      I'm not particularly against the idea of using "dotless"
>> 	domains, but we know who's going to live with the support
>> 	questions when users start complaining. Paul's piece on
>> 	CircleID sums it up nicely. Caveat emptor.
> 
> For the consultation mentioned in Paul Vixie's original message, the
> issue is not whether one-label domains are a good idea or not but
> whether ICANN has really nothing better to do than to add yet another
> stupid regulation in an already very thick book.

According to its bylaws, ICANN's responsibility is to ensure the security and stability of the top level of the DNS (among other resources) at the same time as it is supposed to increase competition to improve service, reduce cost, foster innovation, blah blah blah. I'm not sure how ICANN is supposed to do that without 'regulations'.

The ICANN community has, through a 10+ year excruciatingly painful process, decided to allow for an unprecedented expansion of the root zone. Regardless of whether the expansion is a good idea, I personally believe that given it is going to occur, it is appropriate to be conservative in the degrees of freedom in which we can shoot ourselves in the foot. 

As documented in SAC053 (and discussed on this list), weird shit happens because many software developers assumed that a domain name has a dot in it. Given there is one root and that pretty much everybody is dependent upon it, you probably want to minimize the surprises that are associated with the root. To me, this means that you make exceptions to allow for surprises rather than the opposite. Over time, as software developers fix their broken code, it should become easier to get those exceptions for folks that care.

Regards,
-drc