[IP] more on Neustar to create their own DNS root

[David Farber <dave@farber.net>]

Begin forwarded message:

From: John R Levine <johnl@iecc.com>
Date: September 30, 2005 10:36:11 PM EDT
To: David Farber <dave@farber.net>
Cc: "Steven M. Bellovin" <smb@cs.columbia.edu>
Subject: Re: [IP] Neustar to create their own DNS root


> Neustar, a company that should certainly know better, has announced
> that they're going to create a .gprs TLD to serve the mobile phone
> industry
> (http://www.neustar.com/pressroom/files/announcements/ 
> ns_pr_09282005.pdf)
> This, of course, requires creation of a private root zone, against
> the very strong warnings in RFC 2826. ...

This isn't quite as stupid as it seems.  The GSM industry needs some
way to maintain its roaming user database, the database is getting
considerably more complicated with 3G features, and it looks to me
like they made a reasonable decision to use DNS over IP to implement
it rather than inventing yet another proprietary distributed database.
So this is really a private network disjoint from the Internet, and it
doesn't matter what names they use, although I agree it would have
been a good idea to plan ahead and pick names that won't be used
elsewhere.  I suppose that's what 3gppnetwork.org is for.


> Why aren't they using .gprs.mobi for this?

Probably because .mobi is intended for content delivered to mobile
phones, not routing infrastructure.

Incidentally, the .mobi people told me that they have all sorts of
rules about requiring that all .mobi web sites be suitable for mobile
users with WAP and such, they're planning to offer domains to the
public in a year or so after the industry players have had first pick
of names, and when people start putting random junk in .mobi (can I
have dick.mobi?) there won't be anything they can do about it because
their challenge process is way too cumbersome to be useful.

Regards,
John Levine, johnl@iecc.com, Primary Perpetrator of "The Internet for  
Dummies",
Information Superhighwayman wanna-be, http://www.johnlevine.com, Mayor
"A book is a sneeze." - E.B. White, on the writing of Charlotte's Web


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