On Wed, Jul 10, 2013 at 5:39 PM, Dave Crocker <dhc@xxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
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Website: http://hallambaker.com/
On 7/10/2013 11:59 AM, Russ Housley wrote:It's unfortunate that the IAB did not choose to circulate a draft before releasing the Statement. The Statement could have been made a bit stronger in the concern it expresses.
The IAB has made a statement on dotless domains. You can find this statement here:
http://www.iab.org/documents/correspondence-reports-documents/2013-2/iab-statement-dotless-domains-considered-harmful/
Or it may have ended up more balanced or it might have more weight.
The IAB is selected by a process than ensures it is accountable for no one. Therefore is speaks for no one. If the IAB wants to claim the authority of speaking for the IETF in any matter it needs to circulate drafts and ensure that it reflects IETF opinion before claiming to have reached a conclusion.
The DNS is going to go dotless. That is inevitable when people are paying a quarter million dollars to get a dotless domain from ICANN. Trying to control the situation with contractual language assumes that ICANN is going to forgo large amounts of revenue over a technical concern.
Any issues that are created by dotless domains are going to be small potatoes compared to the horror show resulting from the assignment of .corp. And no, the problem with .corp is not the fact that there are a few thousand certificates issued, it is the fact that there is a vast amount of enterprise infrastructure predicated on the belief that .corp is a reserved toplevel domain in the same way that 10.x.x.x is a reserved IP zone.
ICANN shows no sign of forgoing the registration fees for .corp which is only one domain so why are they going to forgo the registration fees for .microsoft .bankamerica and the other 10,000 companies that would pay that type of money to protect their brand?
This is big money for the ICANN staff. Beckstrom was paid close to $1 million if you add in all the bonuses. And the bonuses are profit related. So pretending that ICANN is going to hold off on the commercial opportunities because of its tax status as a non-profit is to have a criminally naive view of human nature.
And it is not just ICANN that has a commercial interest here. The proper use of dotless domains ultimately threatens the commercial interests of the TLD operators. Some of which are represented on the IAB. And sorry, if I don't elect people then they don't represent me and f they don't represent me and my interests I will conclude they represent their employers.
People are going to get used to typing in web.bankamerica or the like because businesses are going to have a big incentive to drive users to the dotless domains they control rather than continue to be held hostage by every rent seeker with a new TLD - of which there will be several thousand new ones every year under the TLD scheme.
Dotless domains are an inevitable consequence of the expansion of the TLD. The job of the IAB should be to deal with the inevitable not perform impressions of King Cnute.
And before people start bringing up all the reasons I am wrong here, first consider the fact that for many years it was IETF ideology that NATs were a terrible thing that had to be killed. A position I suspect was largely driven by some aggressive lobbying by rent-seeking ISPs looking to collect fees on a per device basis rather than per connection. If you look back in the archives of the IETF list you will see that my position of NAT, that it is an essential transitional technology for IPv6 was attacked by many people sitting on the IAB for many years.
Today most people have come to accept my position on NAT, in fact it has become the mainstream position. But none of the people who spent time trying to slap me down or get me to stop expressing a heretical view have ever said 'hey Phill you were right all along'. And I don't expect things to be different this time round. But in ten years time it will be obvious that domains are going to be dotless and three of the biggest dotless domains are going to be called .apple and .microsoft and .google and they are going to be the companies writing much of the software used to connect to the Internet and their commercial interests are not exactly best served by supporting clapped out thirty year old software programs.
Dotted domains were a bad idea in DNS to start with and giving a perpetually renewing contract to Network Solutions to operate the best one was sillier. We should embrace the opportunity to throw a bad engineering decision into the dustbin of history not try to take the side of the TLD operators whose rent seeking opportunities are threatened by the inevitable transition to a dotless scheme.
Website: http://hallambaker.com/