On Tue, Jul 14, 2015 at 09:47:43PM +0200, George Michaelson <ggm@xxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote a message of 136 lines which said: > 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 would love to see a more detailed analysis of the nature of DNS but, in the mean time: > 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. The "special use names document", RFC 6761, has already been used (for .local) and nobody objected at this time. > since the rest of it is political and weakly argued, many would > chose to ignore it No, there are practical reasons to "register" .onion: * the forum of X.509 CAs decided to stop issuing certs for names "unregistered" so if onion sites want to use HTTPS, they need some form of recognition, * the special handling by software (section 2 of the I-D) will help to prevent leaks in the DNS (which are bad for privacy).