I have no substantive technical reason to oppose, and I think the request is probably well-formed against the RFC which documents how and when to request this class of delegation.
But we do not exist in a vacuum and I think the combination of 'because we coded it that way' and 'we want it' are really very poor reasons to enact the special-use domain name request.
I think this is a politically naive request, and enacts a poor architecture of name to locator models, and misunderstands both the nature of domain names in general, the DNS specifically, and the role of the omnibox and URL bar in a modern browser, which inexorably relates to calls to gethostbyname() on the contents of a URL.
I think it would be a mistake to proceed with .Onion, and I think the IESG would be well advised to re-consider the special use names documents, because they are a poor fit for the modern world.
I do not expect to post again on this. Since my reasoning is essentially non-technical many would chose to ignore it, and since the rest of it is political and weakly argued, many would chose to ignore it on those grounds too.
But its what I think.
I think .Onion is a huge mistake.
-G
On Tue, Jul 14, 2015 at 9:24 PM, The IESG <iesg-secretary@xxxxxxxx> wrote:
The IESG has received a request from the Domain Name System Operations WG
(dnsop) to consider the following document:
- 'The .onion Special-Use Domain Name'
<draft-ietf-dnsop-onion-tld-00.txt> as Proposed Standard
The IESG plans to make a decision in the next few weeks, and solicits
final comments on this action. Please send substantive comments to the
ietf@xxxxxxxx mailing lists by 2015-08-11. Exceptionally, comments may be
sent to iesg@xxxxxxxx instead. In either case, please retain the
beginning of the Subject line to allow automated sorting.
Abstract
This document uses the Special-Use Domain Names registry to register the
'.onion' Top Level Domain (TLD) for the Tor Network. This is deemed necessary
for hosts on the ToR network to apply for and receive legitimate SSL Certificates.
The file can be obtained via
https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/draft-ietf-dnsop-onion-tld/
IESG discussion can be tracked via
https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/draft-ietf-dnsop-onion-tld/ballot/
No IPR declarations have been submitted directly on this I-D.