--On Friday, April 1, 2022 09:05 +1300 Brian E Carpenter
<brian.e.carpenter@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
>> The documents relating to the domain are not IESG-approved
>> documents. They are not covered by the agreement which
>> supplements the ICANN-IETF MoU signed between the IETF
>> Administration LLC and the Internet Corporation for Assigned
>> Names and Numbers.
> That doesn't matter. The domain names concerned are in the
> category of "assignments of domain names for technical uses"
> defined in the basic MoU, which are explicitly "not considered
> to be policy issues" and remain under the IETF's control.
Brian,
I had planned to save this for another day but, while I think it
is easy to categorize NSAP.INT that way, I wonder on what basis
you justify subdomains of TPC.INT as "technical use". It is an
SLD that has a rather-odd looking subdomain structure, one that
(deliberately if I remember the discussions at the time
correctly) does not require any special handling in the DNS
itself. Beyond that, it is, as far as the DNS is concerned,
rather ordinary, with some applications-level protocols using
the DNS to simply map names (however odd-looking the might be to
addresses.
Let me illustrate with a few examples and accompanying questions:
Suppose I were running a circus with several touring companies,
each of which had several carriages and wagons for different
types of performers, wagon numbers for each performer type, and
each wagon contained one or more hosts that I wanted to
identify. I also got together with other circus operators,
plunked down my money, and got an appropriate TLD. To avoid
arguments about who got which names, I numbered the companies,
the carriages, and the computers, ending up a DNS structure
looking like
<host>.<carriage>.<performer-type>.<company>.johns-big-top.circus.
I'd then have FQDNs that looked like
2.1.1.3.johns-big-top.circus.
and that were used for plain, ordinary, host name to address
mapping.
Is that a "technical use" even though the TLD would have to be
allocated by ICANN? If it is not, what distinguished it from
the domain names of TPC.INT? Number of labels aside, they look
pretty much alike once one get below the SLD? Both are used for
name to address mapping -- no special RRs or odd interpretations
of the DATA portion of the DNS records.
Second example:
Suppose ITU concluded that the TPC.INT numbering scheme was
really interesting and that they have a good use for it
(although probably pointing to servers belonging National
Administrations or numbering databases rather that privately
operated hosts. They set that up using precisely the same
reversed-number labeling structure as that used by TPC.INT only
subsidiary to E164.ITU.INT. Would that make that E164 subtree a
"technical use"? If so, would their decision to create that
subtree suddenly put all of ITU.INT a domain under IETF control,
overriding whatever arrangements exist between ITU and IANA
because of the words in the MOU?
Third example:
Suppose, when the ideas that led to the TPC activity came along,
it had been registered, not in INT, but in NET, but otherwise
with exactly the same structure and protocols being supported.
(The reason why it ended up in INT is a piece of history I don't
know and suddenly find interesting, but, if I had to guess, it
might be along the lines of "because they could" or "it was
free".) Would that make it "not a technical use" just because
of the TLD used to house/anchor it?
Although I can think of several reasons why it would have been a
bad idea, the MOU could have defined "domain for technical use"
by either an enumerated list of such domains or as anything that
was not on an enumerated list of intergovernmental-type bodies.
It didn't. It also could have said "Other than in ARPA, ICANN
gets to decide what is or is not a technical use subdomain". Or
it could say that with the IETF in charge or established some
sort of procedure for making the determination. It didn't do
any of those things either. It would have been reasonable at
the time to assert that the ARPA TLD was entirely "technical
use" and then discuss selected subdomains of INT, but it didn't
do that either: AFAICT, it does not call out either TLD by name.
That, in turn, creates some interesting questions of authority
over "domains for technical use" or even delegated subdomains
for inverse DNS lookup that might exist in assorted ccTLDs. The
MOU implies that all of those are under IETF control, something
that would come as quite a surprise to assorted RIRs and
countries. Unless there is a plan to update the MOU to make all
of that more clear in a way that would suit today's needs better
(an update that would presumably require signoff from ICANN,
possibly even ICANN during the time of the DOC contract and/or
DOC), we are stuck with what we have.
Of course, the IETF and ICANN could initiate a new ICANN PDP
with the goal of creating a new MOU and, presumably, a modified
and consistent PTI agreement. If that feels like a good idea,
let's get the PDP started now and, if we are really lucky and
things move at maximum speed, recent experience with ICANN
suggests we will be able to come back to this in five or six
years (more likely longer).
Consequently, unless you can come up with a definition of
"technical use" that makes the examples above come out as
not-technical while TPC.INT is technical, saying that TPC.INT is
"technical use" and therefore under IETF control seems like more
than a bit of a stretch.
I think there are ways to accomplish what is actually desired
here (which, in case I haven't said it lately, I'm personally in
favor of doing) without appealing to fuzzy definitions in the
MOU and having to definitively (and maybe retroactively) define
"technical use", figuring out how to update RFC 1591, creating a
clear definition of what it means to make a domain historic, and
scratching other itches and issues that might require boiling a
few oceans before the actions can be properly taken. I'm trying
to work on a clear explanation and a proposal about how to do
that. But I'm convinced that, if we have to invoke
hairsplitting over undefined terms like "technical use", we are
in big trouble.
john
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