[dns-operations] keeping ICANN busy

[Paul Vixie]

On 2012-09-21 1:24 PM, Carlos M. martinez wrote:
> I'm on Randy on this... if we restrict the things protocols can / should
> do to the lowest level of what applications support, we'll be empty
> handed pretty quickly.

i have two observations.

first, this discussion isn't fruitful and won't be. the place to send
your comments is:

   
http://www.icann.org/en/news/public-comment/sac053-dotless-domains-24aug12-en.htm

second, icann isn't able to set tech policy. what they are able to do is
operate the root zone in a way that keeps the internet stable, secure,
scalable, and safe. to that end, prohibiting anything other than NS and
SOA in the apex of a gTLD will keep a lot of local applications from
believing that external resources are actually internal, thus granting
them powers (if they are web sites) that other external resources would
not have.

there's also the "one world, one internet" thing. names without dots
have always been treated as non-universal, other than the string
"localhost". that is, if i am on yahoo's corporate network and i visit
http://hr/ i will get yahoo's human resources departmental web page; if
i am on google's corporate network and i visit http://hr/ then i will
get google's human resources departmental web page, and so on down
highway 101. icann deals in universal names. they are within their
responsibilities if they tell gTLD awardees that all names created by
this contract must be universal, and thus, no A RR's or AAAA RR's at the
apex.

paul