Registry restrictions

[Stephane Bortzmeyer]

On Mon, May 05, 2008 at 09:42:26PM +0100,
 Gervase Markham <gerv at mozilla.org> wrote 
 a message of 19 lines which said:

> Which I think leads to a useful principle. We can "safely" leave to 
> registries any action, the failure to do which will impact only that 
> registry or its customers. They have full permission to shoot themselves 
> in the foot. We should embed in the protocol any safety measure or 
> restriction which, if not followed, allows a registry to shoot other 
> registries or their customers in the foot.

Nice on paper but not realistic. We do not prevent (in the DNS
standard) ".cm" for adding a wildcard which allow them to typosquatt
".com". Why should we prevent them from registering some IDN domain
names?

The whole discussion seems to imply that the IETF is a sort of
Internet police in charge of protecting the poor users against
unspecified dangers. This directly leads to a dangerous hubris (and it
is also a direct violation of the charter).