Re: Public Suffix List

Gervase Markham wrote:

 [NIC, WHOIS, and WWW]
> Interesting, but I don't think it's relevant. What makes you
> think it is?

I think that any concept of "globally reserved" SLD labels is
FUBAR.  What could happen is that your list claims to list all
SLDs for a given TLD, forgetting NIC, WHOIS, or WWW.  

What TLDs do is their business, and it could be a can of worms
if the TLDs are redelegated later.  It would be nice to know 
the state of the art now for any given TLD, and TLD admins are
free to publish their policies in an RFC.  Unfortunately most
don't, offering an official IANA registry where they can do it
might help, but it is tricky.

They'd need to be aware that it will be near to impossible to
change some published practises even after a TLD redelegation.

E.g., .co.uk is what it is today, any attempt to twist it into
an ordinary domain or wildcard could cause havoc, but it is 
hard to find anybody in the position to say MUST NOT.  If TLD
.uk itself says it, is that binding after a redelegation ?  If
ICANN says it, do they have a MoU with ccTLD .uk covering it ?
AFAIK there is no BCP or standards track RFC to justify this.

If your private list says it, what if they really change their
rules for some convoluted applications we are not yet aware of,
say NAPTR ?  What if the DKIM WG invents a new .co.uk wildcard
for ADSP purposes ?  BTW, they won't, but IMO your list cannot
guarantee that nobody else does it.

That you forwarded your question to the HTTPbis list triggered
my sitefinder.verisign alert, HTTP is not the only user of DNS.

>> At the time when it was created I submitted a few obscure
>> cases like .e164.arpa to the SURBL suffix white list, 
 
> Where can I find a copy of this list?

What I had in mind was <http://www.surbl.org/faq.html#cctlds>
with a link to <http://spamcheck.freeapp.net/two-level-tlds> -
IMHO the term "two level TLDs" is already too wrong to fix it.

> We are maintaining it for anyone and everyone to use. If IANA
> were interested in maintaining this information instead of us,
> that would be great.

I think that IANA is not "interested" to create new registries,
they are "obliged" to do this under RFC 5226 and 2860 rules. :-)

See <http://www.iab.org/documents/correspondence/index.html> with
http://www.iab.org/documents/correspondence/IANA-2006/IAB-IANA-Position.htm
http://www.iab.org/documents/correspondence/2008-02-15-midterm-view-icann-doc-jpa.html

 Frank

Received on Monday, 9 June 2008 14:52:44 UTC