Future of .org is to be decided soon

Tue Jul 16 11:50:03 PDT 2002

On Tue, Jul 16, 2002 at 10:56:34AM -0700, William R Ward wrote:
> "Mark C. Langston" <mark at bitshift.org> writes:
> > No problem.  After all, these are the folks that went against
> > RFC2606 and made example.[com|net|org] resolve.  And yet they
> > talk about "protecting the stability of the Internet" with a
> > straight face.
> 
> They resolve, but they belong to IANA and resolve to a web server that
> just displays a simple message saying what they are for.  I just
> rereasd 2606, and it says "The Internet Assigned Numbers Authority
> (IANA) also currently has the following second level domain names
> reserved which can be used as examples." about example.{com|net|org}.
> I'd say they are following it just fine.
> 

Well, they always "belonged" to IANA, and were explicitly reserved for
documentation purposes per RFC2606.  However, they never resolved until
last year, when ICANN made the (IMO, poor) decision to make them
resolve.  I also re-read RFC2606 several times, both when that decision
was made, and prior to making that post.  If you read it further, it
states,

   "Or test or example code might be written that accesses a
   TLD that is in use with the thought that the test code would only be
   run in a restricted testbed net or the example never actually run.
   Later, the test code could escape from the testbed or the example be
   actually coded and run on the Internet. Depending on the nature of
   the test or example, it might be best for it to be referencing a TLD
   permanently reserved for such purposes."

...and goes on to say,

   "Test and experimental software can escape
   and end up being run against the global operational DNS."

While it doesn't explicitly state that "these SLDs should never 
resolve" (in fact, it spends most of the time discussing the TLDs,
and does state that .loopback should have an explicit A record),
my interpretation of RFC2606 is that these domains, both TLD and
SLD -- with the exception of .loopback -- were never meant to 
resolve.  To do otherwise would be detrimental to the operational
DNS.  One can also infer that the lack of resolution for the
example.* SLDs from 1995-2001 is evidence of this intent.  To
be blunt, if Jon Postel had wanted example.* to resolve, he 
would have made example.* resolve long before ICANN came into 
being and decided to repeately overstep its mandate.  There was
no reason whatsoever for ICANN to make example.* resolve last
February (Feb 4, 2001, IIRC), other than that it was probably
something Kent Krispin had been itching to do, and ICANN had
hired him to do IT work for them shortly before.  Note that
the server for these domains resides in ICANN's Marina del Ray
offices.

-- 
Mark C. Langston                         Sr. Systems Administrator
mark at bitshift.org                                  Project Phoenix
Systems & Network Admin                             SETI Institute
http://www.bitshift.org                              mark at seti.org