RE: IETF tree URL registration procedure incomplete

> I know Larry's email isn't attempting to provide a thorough summary of our
> "tv:" draft, but I feel that there's a misconception here that our draft
> somehow gives American broadcasters unfair rights in the "tv:" namespace.
> This is not the case.  What the draft actually says in section 3.3 on
> network identifiers is: 
> 
>    "The current practice is simply to
>    compare network identifiers against a list of those known to be
>    available on the receiver." 
> 
> In other words, in the US "tv:abc" is likely to tune you to the local
> affiliate of the American Broadcasting Company, while on a receiver in
> Australia "tv:abc" will take you to the Australian Broadcast Corporation.
> The only registrar in this draft is the receiver itself, so it's local
> rather than global.
> 
> Granted, this behavior is exactly what some people object to in the draft.
> But that's not the same as (and, in fact, it's exactly the opposite of)
> somehow rewarding the global identifier "tv:abc" to the entity that happens
> to use the "ABC" abbreviation in the US.

But there's a difference between the situation with 'news:' (where
there really is a global name space of netnews groups), and 'file:'
(where the reference is in practice always to some local resource),
and relative URLs (where the sender has some way of setting or
inferring what the BASE is for the relative URL provided.)

In the case of 'tv:abc' in any kind of Internet content, the
sender has no way of knowing anything about the receiver's mapping
of network identifiers to channels. In this case (unlike all of
the other cases), it's likely that those with the most content
(US content providers) will provide links which *they* intend
to refer to mainly US network identifiers. The result will be
that most TV URLs that are authored with a station identifier will
use 'tv:abc' to refer to the American Broadcasting Company, and
those who have a mapping to the Australian Broadcast Corporation
will just be out of luck. The Australian receiver's will wind up
adapting (after all, they wanted to watch "Dallas", too, if that's
what the link *meant*), and the result will be that 'tv:abc' will
evolve to mean the primary meaning.

I don't think that draft-ietf-urlreg-guide-05.txt currently
does a good job of layout out this guideline, and I propose
adding some text to it to capture some requirement for
'uniform interpretation': does the URL designate the same
'resource' no matter where and who is interpreting it. We
might want to acknowledge that some schemes don't do this,
and they suffer because of it.

Larry