This ``clarification'' document prohibits several perfectly legitimate, very widely deployed, AXFR implementation techniques. See my web page http://cr.yp.to/djbdns/axfr-clarify.html for details. In particular, this document violates RFC 2119, section 6, in five separate ways. At least seven people have gone on record as objecting to axfr-clarify: Dean Anderson, Len Budney, Felix von Leitner, Kenji Rikitake, Aaron Swartz, Sam Trenholme (MaraDNS implementor), and me (djbdns implementor). Furthermore, the Yokohama minutes report a WG decision that axfr-clarify is ``too bind specific''---too specific to BIND 9, to be precise. Despite this decision and these extensive objections, the WG chairs declared ``consensus'' for axfr-clarify and sent it to the IESG. Those claims of consensus were clearly fraudulent: there was no WG discussion of axfr-clarify in the interim! Subsequent discussions did not resolve any of the objections. A review of all of the axfr-clarify discussions in the WG list archive shows that this document is being pushed primarily by people who have been paid for BIND work: Mark Andrews, Roy Arends, David Conrad, Danny Mayer, Jim Reid, Paul Vixie, Brian Wellington, document author Andreas Gustafsson, and WG chair Gudmundsson. There are non-BIND people who support the document, notably PowerDNS implementor Bert Hubert, but my understanding is that Hubert's support is based entirely on the hope that this document will prevent future interoperability problems, without regard to the huge redeployment costs that this document is imposing on the users of existing implementations. Note that the users attacked by this document include BIND 8 users---who are no longer represented in the WG by implementors, now that the BIND implementors are pushing BIND 9. The document's proponents admit that their ``clarification'' imposes rules disobeyed by BIND 8. My survey http://cr.yp.to/surveys/dns1.html two months ago showed that 45% of all .com names were served by BIND 8, while only 23% were served by BIND 9. ---D. J. Bernstein, Associate Professor, Department of Mathematics, Statistics, and Computer Science, University of Illinois at Chicago P.S. You know what really amazes me about this? In another forum, a few people, including a former IESG member, are objecting to an incredibly valuable requirement that software support a universal encoding (UTF-8) of a universal character set (Unicode). Why? Because this requirement would force some existing software to change---and these people claim that the IETF _never_ demands changes from deployed software that complies with the previous standards.