> I suggest that we require all address suffixes to end with .onion;
> other TLDs are not reserved like .onion is, and maybe we shouldn't
> squat any we haven't squatted already.

FWIW it's not at all clear to me that this is a concern that IETF or
ICANN will care about. 

Hi.  

My name is Alec.  

I fought that battle.  I still bear the scars.

Nick is right. Jeremy is not right.  

ICANN and IETF and (nobody mentioned) CA/B-Forum members will violently attack Tor as being weird if it blithely ignores the rest of DNS space.

Also, the concept of the ".alt" domain has been discussed for a long time, and last I saw will continue to be discussed for a long time.

For Tor to not shoot itself in the head and foot simultaneously, it must:
  1. stick to ".onion" as a top level domain
  2. not tread on the rest of the namespace in any way whatsoever
  3. be able to make credible arguments that whatever exists under ".onion" is somehow cryptographic, attested by certs, blockchains, and shit like that, rather than "authorities" which would otherwise make the DNSOP workgroup feel pissy
If I was in charge, I would say that we risk overthinking this, and it would be better to:
  • mandate use of fully DNS-compliant syntax, including but not limited to: acceptable max length, max label length, charset and composition
  • declare a registry of short, valid labels, in the second-from-right position in the name
  • reserve "tor" and "name" in that registry (ie: *.tor.onion, *.name.onion)
  • park the entire issue for 12 months
Because some geeks are nerds there will doubtless be arguments about the creation of a registry, about forking the codebase, about "I am taking my ball and going home because this is oppression!" and a bunch of other stuff.

Hence "parking" the issue because this is all meaningless until prop224 addresses ship, and there should be plenty of time in the next 12 months for people to think about how to fill the usability space with $PET_IDEA, and to my mind the changeover period between 80-bit and 256-bit addresses should be long enough that nobody need fret about it right now. 

The Prop224 migration will be doubtless faster than the IPv6 migration, but anyone who says the changeover period should be less than 2 years is trying to kill Tor adoption.

    -a

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