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more on Neustar to create their own DNS root
From: David Farber <dave () farber net>
Date: Sat, 1 Oct 2005 08:17:45 -0400
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 ------------------------------------- You are subscribed as lists-ip () insecure org To manage your subscription, go to http://v2.listbox.com/member/?listname=ip Archives at: http://www.interesting-people.org/archives/interesting-people/
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