>I believe that .onion is, essentially, a way for structuring protocol >addresses so that they appear to be DNS names. It does not conform to the >delegation model of the DNS, and it requires special knowledge on the part >of the handler to understand it. ... Right, that's why it's a special use name. As others have noted, one reason to regisiter it as special use is to deter hijacking if the names leak into the real DNS. The other is for bureaucratic reasons related to SSL CAs. Those seem reasonably compelling to me. We had a long discussion about the perverse incentives that this might create for other people to invent other names. Yes, they might, but this is engineering rather than art, and we need to deal with things as they are, not as we might prefer they should have been. R's, John