Consensus Call Tranche 3 (Permanence)

Kenneth Whistler kenw at sybase.com
Wed Oct 15 03:01:02 CEST 2008


> As I mentioned ages ago, our <registry_hat=registrar_hat="on"> contracts 
> with ICANN are not unbounded. I appreciate the UTC's interest in 
> permanence, but asking for permanence in a DNS defined by contract is as 
> silly as [[ insert whatever appropriate simile here... ]]

Perhaps Mark will speak with his <participant_hat=google_hat="on">,
but I don't think anybody is either asking for or expecting
that either the universe of domain names will be stable
or that any given domain name will be guaranteed in perpetuity
to resolve to a given IP address -- or any other guarantee of
the like.

What I think we are looking for is permanent stability for
the *protocol* we are designing here. So that search engines
(or other processes) that can parse out a given label and
hand it off for domain name resolution one month aren't
faced the next month with the exact same string being
treated as uninterpretable nonsense if they are to conform
to the protocol.

It is fine if an IDN resolves this month and *doesn't* resolve
next month. It isn't fine if I can conformantly interpret
it this month and *cannot* conformantly interpret it
next month.

And the timelines involved are not to the end of time, of course,
but we are certainly talking about deployed software whose
lifetime can easily exceed 10 years and distributed data which
may still be around after several decades.

--Ken



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