20140915 - Liaison Statement Russ Housley/ICANN

Liaison Statement: Liaison Statement from the IAB to the ICANN Board on Technical Use of Domain Names

Submission Date: 2014-09-15
From: The IAB (Russ Housley)
To: ICANN Board of Directors (jonne.soininen@icann.org)
Cc: Jonne Soininen
The IAB Chair
The IAB
The IAB Executive Director
Response Contact:
Technical Contact:
Purpose: For information
Attachments: (none)
Body:

Dear colleagues,

We are writing this note in order to share with you some work in the IETF regarding domain names for "technical use," as described in RFC 2860.

In RFC 2860 ("Memorandum of Understanding Concerning the Technical Work of the Internet Assigned Numbers Authority," June 2000), the IAB acknowledged the authority of ICANN for policies relating to the assignment of domain names, but retained authority over "assignments of domain names for technical use" (Section 4.3, pg 2):

> 4.3. Two particular assigned spaces present policy issues in addition
> to the technical considerations specified by the IETF: the assignment
> of domain names, and the assignment of IP address blocks. These
> policy issues are outside the scope of this MOU.
>
> Note that (a) assignments of domain names for technical uses (such as
> domain names for inverse DNS lookup), (b) assignments of specialised
> address blocks (such as multicast or anycast blocks), and (c)
> experimental assignments are not considered to be policy issues, and
> shall remain subject to the provisions of this Section 4.

In order to support appropriate technical use of domain names in the context of its protocol development work, the IETF approved RFC 6761 ("Special-Use Domain Names," February 2013). As directed, IANA established and populated a registry for such special-use names (http://www.iana.org/assignments/special-use-domain-names/special-use-domain-names.xhtml).

Recently, several requests have come to the IETF for names to be added to the special-use domain names registry (See: http://www.ietf.org/archive/id/draft-chapin-additional-reserved-tlds-01.txt and http://www.ietf.org/archive/id/draft-grothoff-iesg-special-use-p2p-names-02.txt).

Discussion of these requests under the process established in RFC 6761 has revealed difficulties in applying its guidelines in practice. Under its current charter, the DNSOP working group in the IETF is responsible to review and clarify the overlap between (among other things) the special names registry from RFC 6761 and the public DNS root. This could include consideration of the problem of existing name collisions, provision of additional guidelines, or further modification to the process in RFC 6761 to reduce the potential for collisions in the future. Any changes are to be kept within the constraints of RFC 2860 (or any future modification to RFC 2860).

All such discussion and any modification will be open and transparent to participation by interested parties, in accordance with established IETF processes. We invite participation of interested parties, including members of the ICANN community, in this work.

On behalf of the IAB,
Russ Housley
IAB Chair