[66237] in North American Network Operators' Group
Re: example.com/net/org DNS records
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Doug Barton)
Mon Jan 5 14:47:08 2004
Date: Mon, 5 Jan 2004 11:46:23 -0800 (PST)
From: Doug Barton <barton@iana.org>
To: Roger Marquis <marquis@roble.com>
Cc: "nanog@trapdoor.merit.edu" <nanog@trapdoor.merit.edu>,
"spamtools@lists.abuse.net" <spamtools@lists.abuse.net>
In-Reply-To: <20040104163617.44D66DB03A@mx7.roble.com>
Errors-To: owner-nanog-outgoing@merit.edu
On Sun, 4 Jan 2004, Roger Marquis wrote:
>
> Does anyone know why IANA has assigned NS and A records to the
> example.{com,org,net,...} domains? They even put up a website
> at the IP explaining RFC 2606.
>
> * Why did they assign NSs and a valid IP to these invalid domains?
There's already been a lot of discussion about why this is a good thing,
so I won't reiterate it all. That web site gets roughly 5 million hits a
week, so we believe that it's definitely providing a valuable
educational service to the internet community.
> * Are they breaking the RFC by doing this?
We don't believe we are, and certainly wouldn't intentionally take any
action that violates the RFC's. The IANA is entrusted with safeguarding
a lot of internet resources, and it's a responsibility that we take very
seriously.
> * Are they breaking anti-UCE filters by doing this? (yes)
This is an unfortunate side effect, but we believe that the user
education benefits are worth the cost.
> * Are they harvesting URLs and referrers?
We log the "standard" stuff that just about any other web site would,
including URI's, referers, etc. As someone else pointed out,
"harvesting" the URI's won't really provide us any benefit. As for the
referers, if the community finds this problematic, I would have no
problem turning it off. We don't release the data, and currently we're
not doing anything with it other than logging it, so we wouldn't miss it
if it went away. :)
Hopefully this information is useful. If you have any further questions,
please feel free to contact me.
Doug
--
Doug Barton
General Manager, Internet Assigned Numbers Authority
