TL;DR; I have two ways of achieving my desired end. One of which people are not going to like, the other of which they are totally going to hate. I do not actually require IETF permission for either, nor am I the only person thinking along these lines, I am merely the person whose approach is least likely to result in collateral damage, consider responses in those terms.
I have been following various naming proposals in the PonziCoin world for some time. There are many companies who for a mere $10-200/year will register a shortname for your ethereum wallet so people can give you money. And of course, the cost of ethereum gas for making the payments only makes the cost even stupider. But don't worry, there will be a technical fix for that the minute they find themselves a virgin and a unicorn.
OK, so those proposals are obvious nonsense but the notion of using a Certificate Transparency type log to issue names for life on a first come first served basis is not. Hence my callsign proposal:
[A very similar proposal has been made to ITU by the Chinese delegation under their 'New Internet' scheme though I only became aware of the details of that after I wrote my own. It is my belief that the primary motivation behind the ITU proposal is to prevent the abuse of DNS as a control point in the Internet infrastructure.]
Running infrastructure costs real money but I see no reason for the cost of running the infrastructure proposed to be more than a one-time $0.10 per name. No renewal fees. Names are sold freehold, not rented.
The objective here is to give Internet users a name they can use for life. And yes, I realize that it is impossible to collect $0.10 fees so I plan to sell names in packs of 50 or so. So for the price of a pint of beer you can buy a permanent callsign for yourself and pass out the means to grab one to your friends.
There are of course many social issues to be considered, not least of which where does the surplus go. My proposal being that the whole show to be run by a not-for-profit and the surplus go to fund open source development of secure Internet software, specifications and standards.
But that is not the part I want to talk about right now. What I do want to talk about is how a new naming scheme interfaces to the DNS so that it can be used to connect to legacy applications. Legacy in this context meaning 'the stuff that is working'.
So Alice registers the callsign @alice and can use that in messaging applications that understand the callsign scheme. Which is not hard, just hook up to a callsign resolver and send over a query. As with blockchain, the resolver maintains a complete copy of the log. Queries go to a resolver, not the registry. This means far greater robustness than DNS and offloads almost all the cost from the registry.
But what about that doorbell, that WiFi camera, etc. that Alice has? To talk to them she needs to use her browser and that runs HTTP.
The obvious solution for this is to put a statement in the delegation assertion for @alice to specify an authoritative DNS resolver for the DNS addresses *.alice.mesh. The callsign resolver then delegates to the authoritatives. The net result is that all Alice needs to do to resolve these names is to use a DNS resolver that redirects requests in .mesh to one of the callsign resolvers.
The net result is a protocol that respects the DNS data model at the lower levels while modernizing the root level.
OK so nobody expects me to pay to register .mesh. I am not even going to lift a finger to make a proposal to ICANN.
But I am not the only person making a proposal in this area and while a single pirate TLD designed by someone who knows something of what they are doing is likely to be amusing, a hundred or more is likely to be less so.
Which has me looking at .ARPA instead.
Having Alice type http://coffee.alice.mesh.arpa/ instead of https://coffee.alice.mesh/ is not as nice but she will live with it. or if open callsigns win the naming game, the anybox in her browser will probably let her type coffee@alice and route to the place she expects to go.
Problem here is that RFC 3172 was written in a different era when people were still frightened about the loss of control. The notion that registries are not control points had not yet been understood.
So which would people prefer for the pseudo-delegation?
alice.mesh or alice.mesh.arpa?
This would be a reservation in .arpa, not a delegation.
PHB
(Oh and yes, I do have a browser implementation thanks to the heroes who developed WebView2 at Microsoft. It's Windows only at the moment but should be fixed with MAUI.)
(Oh and yes, I do understand how complex naming gets, I watched it all happening in real time.)
