It seems to me that if we think it's a good idea to specify a domain name that doesn't exist, we're better off clarifying the status of the ones already specified rather than inventing new ones. Since the people who manage .ARPA are the exact same people who manage the root (IANA, operated by ICANN, in both cases), one is as likely to flake as the other. In fact, ICANN is quite aware of the reserved names list. In the current draft of the application process, one of the steps is to check to see if a proposed name is one of the Reserved ones, in which case the application fails immediately. Here's their reserved list: AFRINIC IANA-SERVERS NRO ALAC ICANN RFC-EDITOR APNIC IESG RIPE ARIN IETF ROOT-SERVERS ASO INTERNIC RSSAC CCNSO INVALID SSAC EXAMPLE* IRTF TEST* GAC ISTF TLD GNSO LACNIC WHOIS GTLD-SERVERS LOCAL WWW IAB LOCALHOST IANA NIC *Note that in addition to the above strings, ICANN will reserve translations of the terms "test" and "example" in multiple languages. The remainder of the strings are reserved only in the form included above. (That's ICANN's footnote.) Nonetheless, it occurs to me that the set of DNS names that are reserved or that have special meanings in some protocols are scattered over a lot of different RFCs. So I wrote a strawman to collect them all in one place and make a registry of them: draft-levine-reserved-names-registry-00.txt I think I got all the names, I did some greps over all of the text RFCs looking for things that resembled domain names, and I looked to see what's actually in .ARPA and the root. If other people agree that it's a good idea to have a place that IANA can point to for the reserved names, I'd be happy to move this ahead. Or if we think the situation is OK as it is, we can forget about it. But I see little wisdom in adding another does-not-exist name with semantics not meaningfully different from .INVALID or FOO.INVALID. R's, John _______________________________________________ Ietf mailing list Ietf@xxxxxxxx https://www.ietf.org/mailman/listinfo/ietf