[12402] in Commercialization & Privatization of the Internet
Re: About the creation of new 3-letter domain(s)
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Peter Deutsch)
Tue May 17 17:57:07 1994
From: Peter Deutsch <peterd@bunyip.com>
Date: Tue, 17 May 1994 13:56:56 -0400
In-Reply-To: "Joseph W. Stroup"'s message as of May 16, 14:26
To: "Joseph W. Stroup" <nettech@crl.com>, Jon Postel <postel@isi.edu>
Cc: PAUL@tdr.com, namedroppers@rs.internic.net, bigz@rice.edu,
com-priv@psi.com, ja@ess.cs.ucl.ac.uk, pullen@darpa.mil, PVM@isi.edu,
hostmaster@internic.net, hostmaster@nic.ddn.mil
[ You wrote: ]
> I support the idea of a .PVT domain. This might further clarify business
> and non-business users.
I think we need to do some serious thinking about how
we're going to identify ourselves in cyberspace before we
go off and start creating any new domains. As someone with
two passports (and landed immigrant status in a third
country) I'm certain the partitioning shouldn't be
geographic. I'm also positive that just lumping every
individual registration under a "private domain" is not
going to work. In fact, I suspect we want to figure out a
better way than warping DNS domains to cover people in
this manner.
I remember talking to one of the X.500 people about their
model for putting people into the naming tree. If someone
worked at the CSIRO research centre in Melbourne
Australia, then presumably they'd go under the equivalent
of "csiro.victoria.au". So John Smith would be the
equivalent of "john-smith.csiro.victoria.au" (and
I know that's not their syntax, but it _is_ DNS-like).
Now, assume John wants to register his daughter. Since
she's not a CSIRO employee (after all, she's only ten) she
couldn't be registered as "jane-smith.csiro.victoria.au",
so might end up as ""jane-smith.melbourne.victoria.au".
But wait, her mother is an American who actually
registered back home in California. Does that make her
"judy-jones.la.ca.us"? And does this make any sense, since
presumably their family ties suggest they might prefer to
be seen as "jones-smith.melbourne.victoria.au" (although
this would miff the U.S. relatives no end).
The way I see it, we shouldn't be identifying individuals
in this manner at all. It's overloading what we assume the
DNS is telling us in this case and we'd be better off to
have individuals _within_ a DNS address domain, not
extantiated as one. Alternatively, we need a more dynamic
model for building these logical groupings. Until we
understand what that means, or until we can find a
partitioning of DNS that everyone can live with (or maybe
we add another layer of indirection to allow logical
groupings of DNS records and a means for dereferencing
them) I am quite happy that IANA is going to hold off on
this.
- peterd
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