[dns-operations] Browser Public suffixes list

[Jothan Frakes]

I am really frustrated that the materials developed for IANA to share to
avoid things like this were not distributed, as awareness would have led to
earlier request, which in turn would have diminished the propagation timing
gap with the browser side.

Not saying all the planets would have lined up, but the odds would have
improved.

"Browsers gonna browse" - love that Vixie quote.

The performance of the combined 'omnibox' that mashed up search and
location was also a driver, although screen real estate on mobile/tablet
certainly made this a practical argument for omnibox vs them sweet, sweet
search dollas

Anyways, as far as the propagation timing goes, PSL is just a drop in
component that is *relatively* static, and we're quite mindful of keeping
the file size modest for a number of reasons.  I am glad that the team at
ISOC.IL were able to find waldo within Mozilla and Google.  I think with
Safari it is important to note that updates to it are typically done at the
time of their OS upgrades as a 'whole cloth' update, and it seems Apple
likes to make modest update frequency, so Safari internals are one of the
train cars attached to the OS Train but not the train itself, and this is
just an efficiency thing.

The performance benefit is the best argument I have been presented as to
why there is a static list baked in on the browser.

Generally speaking, the PSL being used as a static list incorporated into
software kind of perpetuates the hosts.txt dilemma that DNS started to
distribute better, and the DBOUND began a good direction but we ended up
with a low 'juice to squeeze' ratio and could not quite work out what
flavor either.

There is some activity inside of the W3C WhatWG kind of as a parallel
evolution to DBOUND (bridge being built from other side of canyon).

Crucially, there are a number of ways in addition to administrative
boundaries that overlap, and there are other projects like DKIM DMARC HSTS
etc that have a lot of overlap in ways a common project might be helpful in
allowing an administrator of a namespace for a domain name in having some
means to express to the internet how they would prefer their domain name be
interacted with.

-Jothan


On Sat, Aug 27, 2022 at 11:26 AM Paul Vixie via dns-operations <
dns-operations at dns-oarc.net> wrote:

>
>
>
> ---------- Forwarded message ----------
> From: Paul Vixie <paul at redbarn.org>
> To: DNS Operations List <dns-operations at lists.dns-oarc.net>
> Cc:
> Bcc:
> Date: Sat, 27 Aug 2022 11:20:53 -0700
> Subject: Re: [dns-operations] Browser Public suffixes list
>
>
> Viktor Dukhovni wrote on 2022-08-27 11:06:
> > On Sat, Aug 27, 2022 at 10:48:46AM -0700, Paul Vixie wrote:
> >>  ...
> >> see: https://www.ietf.org/mailman/listinfo/dbound
> >
> > Another aspect of the problem, is that the browsers unified the address
> > bar and the search bar in order to "improve" (make simpler than
> > possible) the browser user interface.  This creates a fundamental
> > ambiguity about user intent.  Did the user type a URL sans scheme prefix
> > or a search term?  Using the PSL to "disambiguate" is a hack.
>
> browsers gonna browse. there's nothing we can do about that in the
> protocols. time was, any character-by-character current value in the
> browser bar which was syntactically valid as a domain name (by regex
> without reference to a PSL or any other dictionary) would be sent to the
> DNS resolver. apparently this wasn't monetizing enough. we march on.
>
> --
> P Vixie
>
>
>
>
> ---------- Forwarded message ----------
> From: Paul Vixie via dns-operations <dns-operations at dns-oarc.net>
> To: DNS Operations List <dns-operations at lists.dns-oarc.net>
> Cc:
> Bcc:
> Date: Sat, 27 Aug 2022 11:20:53 -0700
> Subject: Re: [dns-operations] Browser Public suffixes list
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