No. 4 says "Strings must not cause any technical instability." which sounds exactly within IETF scope covers the gist of the technical aspects of the ietf list discussion.
We need "cannot be used in a manner that causes technical instablitity. Known causes include, but are not limited to, adding A, AAAA and MX records at the zone apex."
As someone else pointed out, there are currently about two dozen TLDs with A or MX records at the apex. Some of them have been like that for many years, and as best I can tell, the Internet has not thereby collapsed.
I think we all understand that the use of addresses like http://tld/ and foo@tld may be flaky due to bugs in client software, but if someone wants to spend $100 grand on a TLD and install a flaky A or MX, why is that an urgent problem the IETF needs to solve rather than a private issue between the TLD and its registrants?
Also keep in mind that most of those apex records are in ccTLDs over which ICANN and the IETF have no authority, so no matter what the we were to say, they're not going away.
Regards, John Levine, johnl@xxxxxxxx, Primary Perpetrator of "The Internet for Dummies", Information Superhighwayman wanna-be, http://www.johnlevine.com, ex-Mayor "More Wiener schnitzel, please", said Tom, revealingly. _______________________________________________ Ietf@xxxxxxxx https://www.ietf.org/mailman/listinfo/ietf