[hardaker]

You may wish to read [RFC9476], which provides a solution for anchoring alternate name spaces in a way that provides both a signalling point for establishing that you've left the DNS and a way to prevent collisions with the DNS itself.

[RFC9476]: https://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc9476.html

[zrm]

This doesn't help much to prevent collisions though, does it? An alternate namespace is obviously not going to use a TLD that already exists in the DNS, but it's much more likely to use one that exists in a different alternate namespace they've never heard of, since those will be more obscure and more likely to be missed. Putting them both under .alt does nothing to prevent this.

What you're really doing is reserving all of the as yet unallocated namespace to the DNS, privileging it over any alternatives which then have to use longer names. What you need is a mechanism for alternate namespaces to register their use of a particular subset of the global namespace against both other alternate namespaces and the DNS, at which point you wouldn't need to put them all under .alt.

They also immediately damaged that subset of the namespace:

> DNS stub and recursive resolvers do not need to look them up in the DNS context.

Now some DNS stub resolver implementers or administrators will read this and reject any queries under .alt, making it unsuitable for any namespace you would like intermediary resolvers to look up in an upstream server that supports them.

[hardaker]

> This doesn't help much to prevent collisions though, does it?

It helps alternate name spaces not collide with the DNS. Without a registration system, it doesn't help alternate names spaces from colliding with each other (see .wallet for an example of this happening at the TLD space). There was a very large, um, "discussion" about whether or not there should be a registration system for alternate spaces when many of the alternate spaces were being specifically designed because they hated registration systems in the first place. EG, putting a centralized registration on top of decentralized architectures seems, um, weird at best. Supposedly the GNU naming system is creating a registration system that is optional to use. I don't know details about it and whether it's up and running yet.

The real value (entirely IMHO) with .alt as a separation is that it allows people to figure out when they're communicate about why person A can't access the resources that person B has referred them to, is that when it ends in .alt it points toward "oh, I need to look somewhere else than the DNS" vs when it's under a TLD you'd have to know which are alternate spaces and which are not (for each person too -- see the gnu DNS also).

>> DNS stub and recursive resolvers do not need to look them up in the DNS context. > Now some DNS stub resolver implementers or administrators will read this and reject any queries under .alt

So.... let's say they don't reject them and you send a alternate name space query to a resolver that doesn't understand that alternate name space? You're still going to end up with a failed lookup, and thus just leaking alternate space queries to the DNS that can never resolve. This will look just like a rejection, but with a longer delay.

Alternate name spaces need alternate resolution mechanisms (by design), so software that wants to support both will need to figure out where that split point is so they can switch from one resolution system to another when needed.

The real thing is: why are alternate spaces even caring whether or not they look like the DNS and have a TLD? If you want to truly revolutionize naming, then do something revolutionary and discard the current letters/numbers/etc separated by dots and create something entirely new and stop trying to look like the existing system. But that's an even harder problem because it also requires rewriting a lot of UI code. So most intentionally want to conflict with the DNS because it "helps them", theoretically, get more market space by hopefully believing that applications will suddenly be able to use an alternate naming space -- all without the user knowing they're in one?

[zrm]

> There was a very large, um, "discussion" about whether or not there should be a registration system for alternate spaces when many of the alternate spaces were being specifically designed because they hated registration systems in the first place.

Presumably what they hated was registration requirements.

If I need some namespace for my open source project, I can go and register a top level domain for it and all I have to do is pay $185,000 and shepherd it through a complex bureaucratic process and then pay $25,000/year forever. So corporations with more money than they know what to do with have their own top level domain that they don't even use for anything but small projects can't register one at all. Then there is nothing telling anyone else that they should pick a different TLD if they don't want a collision, and you create a default where new projects have to start out using unregistered namespace and then continue to use it as they start to get bigger.

Meanwhile you could have what amounts to an append-only wiki with some basic rules like "if your purpose needs multiple names, you get one TLD and put the rest under it" and "you have to register it again every 10 years if you're still using it". Then you wouldn't have two different things trying to use .wallet because one would have registered it first and the other would know to use something else.

> The real value (entirely IMHO) with .alt as a separation is that it allows people to figure out when they're communicate about why person A can't access the resources that person B has referred them to, is that when it ends in .alt it points toward "oh, I need to look somewhere else than the DNS" vs when it's under a TLD you'd have to know which are alternate spaces and which are not (for each person too -- see the gnu DNS also).

This seems like it would be pretty easy to look up if there was a namespace registry (and is already going to make you suspicious of this if you don't recognize the TLD), and doesn't work for the many things that already exist and don't use .alt.

> So.... let's say they don't reject them and you send a alternate name space query to a resolver that doesn't understand that alternate name space? You're still going to end up with a failed lookup, and thus just leaking alternate space queries to the DNS that can never resolve. This will look just like a rejection, but with a longer delay.

Except that the resolver might understand that alternate namespace. Suppose that OpenNIC started registering names under .alt, e.g. under .nic.alt, as this implies that they should instead of creating new TLDs. If they're the only ones using .nic.alt, recursive nameservers in general should be able to add the OpenNIC servers to their root hints and then be able to resolve those names, but now the stub resolvers will throw away the queries that might have succeeded.

> Alternate name spaces need alternate resolution mechanisms (by design), so software that wants to support both will need to figure out where that split point is so they can switch from one resolution system to another when needed.

And telling the stub resolvers to throw away the queries prevents that point from being in the upstream resolver. Most anything resolving names to IP addresses should be able to do that. You add support for it to e.g. your WiFi router or the recursive DNS resolver your company uses and then everything on your network can resolve those names.

> The real thing is: why are alternate spaces even caring whether or not they look like the DNS and have a TLD?

Because they want to be supported by existing software. If your upstream DNS server is configured to support OpenNIC or Namecoin or what have you then you can just type those names into your unmodified browser or ssh client etc. and they get resolved.

There are many things that only want to provide an alternative to ICANN and don't have any need to provide an alternative to IP addresses or the way client applications issue name resolution queries.

[hardaker]

I think this could go on for pages and pages more, and we can't get the entire industry to agree on the importance of any particular bullet point yet. I'd love to sit down face-to-face sometime and debate this endlessly, but I've done that with a lot of people on all sides already and there is no easy answer that any conversation has come to. It is never as easy as one side of the argument ever wants it to be.

> If I need some namespace for my open source project, I can go and register a top level domain

One common question here is: if you have an open source project, why do you need a TLD? Why is that special? the TLDs are designed into the DNS space and exceptions aren't cheap. Registering a domain under .org, or .horses is cheap compared to the $185k. And using something under .alt is free. Justifying the need for a TLD is difficult when there are other options.

>> The real thing is: why are alternate spaces even caring whether or not they look like the DNS and have a TLD? > Because they want to be supported by existing software.

That's exactly the point I was making: the goal is to get the cheap way out trying to register part of an existing landscape rather than inventing a new universe. If the new universe is that much better, then everyone will want to deploy it anyway. As the web browser market will tell you, their applications (the only ones that most people care about these days [not me, mind you]) update ever 3 months. Getting them on board with a new universe should be trivial! In fact some browsers already support alternate spaces. Green-slate designs are often much cleaner and better when people aren't trying to do a mix of revolutionary and evolutionary approaches.

[zrm]

> if you have an open source project, why do you need a TLD? Why is that special?

It's not really a matter of whether it's a TLD, though that makes more sense in this context because putting it under some existing TLD like .org would imply to most people that it isn't a separate namespace. And you can see how forcing their names to be of the form myboard.chan.example.horses is putting the alternative at an unnecessary disadvantage vs. just myboard.chan or even myboard.chan.nic when neither .chan nor .nic are existing ICANN top level domains.

You also want it to be designated as a separate namespace, because it is. That makes the stakes much higher than they are for an individual domain name so it shouldn't be possible to lose it in a divorce or to a stickup artist if someone fails to renew it etc.

> That's exactly the point I was making: the goal is to get the cheap way out trying to register part of an existing landscape rather than inventing a new universe. If the new universe is that much better, then everyone will want to deploy it anyway.

Of course they don't want to invent a new universe. Who is going to use a web browser that can only resolve names in a new namespace and can't resolve youtube.com or wordpress.org? And why would someone want that, instead of being able to do both?

To provide a practical example, Tor Browser can resolve both .onion sites and ordinary web pages. Then the .onion sites can link to ordinary ones -- or vice versa, if the ordinary site is inclined to provide a link that only works in Tor Browser.

An upstream nameserver couldn't do that because it onion sites don't have an IP address to put in the response for an ordinary browser, but Namecoin sites do. Which is why there isn't a separate "Namecoin Browser" -- you don't need one.

> As the web browser market will tell you, their applications (the only ones that most people care about these days [not me, mind you]) update ever 3 months. Getting them on board with a new universe should be trivial!

I detect that you're deploying sarcasm because you know that is non-trivial. But then I'm not sure what your point is supposed to be. Are you insisting that people do the thing you know makes their endeavor more likely to fail?

> Green-slate designs are often much cleaner and better when people aren't trying to do a mix of revolutionary and evolutionary approaches.

This seems like telling someone who wants to make electric cars that they're wrong to want them to work on the same roads as gasoline cars.