Re: Mozilla and dotless domains

On 28/09/12 14:20, Gervase Markham wrote:
> Is anyone interested in drafting something, perhaps taking inspiration
> from comments submitted by others?

Seems no-one else is, so here is my proposal. Comments welcome, 
particularly if I'm talking rubbish from a technical perspective!

<start>
Title: Mozilla Response to Dotless Domains Consultation

This submission is sent on behalf of Mozilla, a non-profit organization 
whose mission is to "promote openness, innovation and opportunity on the 
web". We are particularly concerned with the continued smooth 
functioning of the Web in particular and the Internet in general.

Therefore, although we suspect that, for technical reasons, dotless 
domains will not work very well for their owners, it is the effect on 
users, even those with no relationship with any sites under the TLD in 
question, which concerns us.

The DNS' enormous value to mankind is that it is a global namespace - in 
other words, in most cases, every name has a single owner. This is 
something users are able to understand. However, just as there are areas 
of the IP address range reserved for private use (RFC 1918), there are 
also areas of the DNS namespace reserved for private use - either by RFC 
(RFC 2606) or convention (e.g. .local, used by Zeroconf).

It is our contention that the dotless part of the DNS namespace is /de 
facto/, and should be /de jure/, reserved for private use in similar manner.

Countless companies use dotless names for their internal servers. 
Dotless names already have a meaning in a local context, and no-one can 
tell from the outside what names have meaning where. This is very 
similar to the use of the private use IP address ranges. And, just as 
creating a routable host on the Internet with IP address 192.168.0.1 
would lead to all sorts of undesired effects, so would creating a host 
with the global DNS name "home" or "search".

We are particularly concerned about the security implications of dotless 
domains. For example, 7 companies have applied for the new TLD "mail". 
There must be many thousands of companies running an internal server 
called "mail". A poorly-configured DNS server could lead to the sending 
of private company email to the servers of the winning applicant.

Mozilla therefore joins the SSAC in being opposed to the idea of 
"dotless domains", and we strongly recommend that new gTLD operators be 
contractually prohibited from attempting to create them. Mozilla does 
not rule out taking steps to ignore such records if their existence is 
leading to security or stability problems for users.
<end>