[urn] Re: third-party registrations

Peter Saint-Andre <[email protected]> writes:
> 1. Dale, I'd like to understand your reasoning behind saying that a WG 
> could reach consensus that non-coordinated incorporation is OK. Are you 
> suggesting that a future URN WG could make a policy decision along the 
> lines of what you propose and update RFC 8141 accordingly? Or are you 
> suggesting that some other kind of working group (such as the SPICE WG) 
> could make such a decision as long as it receives IETF consensus?

Let me try to clarify my thoughts:

In the present instance, the GLUE URN proposal, we have the parallel
technical and political problems of incorporating an External Authority's
identifiers into a URN namespace.  Technically, the proposal depends on
the External Authority enforcing the uniqueness/persistence requirements
of URNs without the External Authority taking responsibility for doing so.
Politically, the Eternal Authority might see the proposal as the IETF
incurring on their domain of expertise/authority/responsibility/turf.

As a committee of "designated experts", we operate under the authority
delegated by "the IETF consensus process", which seems to mean what is
stated in RFCs that have been ratified by the IESG, currently RFC 8141.

It seems clear to me that this situation of "third-party registrations"
had not been thought of at the time when RFC 8141.  In particular,
section 6.3 is provided for namespaces that incorporate identifier
systems defined by External Authorities, but it clearly assume that all
such registrations will be done by the External Authority in question.

So the committee is saddled with a techno-political problem with no
guidance.

My concept is that the proper resolution is further guidance from "the
IETF consensus process", which means that a suitable working group needs
to chew over this problem and produce an RFC.  It doesn't seem to me to
be critical whether it is officially a revision of RFC 8141 or not; it
will be an extension of the guidance from the RFCs to the committee.

In the present instance, the place where I expect it would have happened
is the SPICE WG.  However, at this point, I have not seen evidence that
this problem has been explicitly discussed and the WG come to a
consensus regarding these issues.

This does raise the question of whether certain working groups have
"more authority" over certain areas than other working groups, or what to
do if two working groups come to conflicting "consensuses" over some
item.  Regarding that, my only thought is that the IESG would be the
place to resolve the conflict.  And in a sense, the IESG would
automagically do so, since it has to ratify all documents in order for
them to become RFCs, and a newer RFC updates an older RFC.

The preceding paragraph is qualified by the fact that a WG can't produce
a proposed RFC that is outside the scope of its charter.  (As witnessed
by the "ballot discuss" items for this very I-D listed in
https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/draft-ietf-spice-glue-id/history/.)
And charters have to be approved by the IESG.  So in practice, for a WG
to produce a policy on these questions, it must first have the IESG
approve that work as part of its charter, that is, de-facto approve that
it can extend the URN policies to deal with "third-party registrations"
(though that might mean forbidding them).

Dale

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