Re: [enum-wg] Italian Nameservers for 9.3.164.arpa. dead?

[John C Klensin john+ietf@localhost]

--On Monday, 21 January, 2008 19:14 +0000 Jim Reid
jim@localhost wrote:

>...
> BTW, does anyone ask Verisign to pull the plug on
> lamedelegation.com (say) because its broken delegation is
> causing operational problems for their mail server? If not,
> why is a different approach necessary in e164.arpa for
> ENUM-aware SIP servers?

Jim,

While I'm not sure that pulling delegations in e164.arpa is a
good idea -- I'm merely suggesting that it is feasible if the
community wants it-- I don't think the above analogy applies at
all.  If someone goes to a registrar and registers a label to be
placed in COM, no assertion at all is being made (any more)
about what that label points to (or doesn't).   The assumption
is that, if the label lasts long enough, the registrant will pay
some token amount of money, but that is about it.  The other
assumption is that there is nothing sparce, in the technical
sense, about the namespace.   You can probably remember when the
NIC would threaten to pull delegations for sufficient
misbehavior, but those days are long past.

By contrast, e164.arpa was rather carefully constructed on the
theory that the namespace was highly restricted and tied to some
very specific concepts and rules.  There was a recent thread
about labels in the zone that didn't represent E.164 codes.
Whether those that represent an administrative convenience are
worth the trouble it would take to eliminate them remains a
question, but there is no question that they are invalid as the
zone is formally designed and specified.  The whole purpose of
having e164.arpa involved having a validated set of operators
whose validation included national signoff about appropriateness
and involved that in order that users and systems could trust
(modulo the issues that DNSSEC is supposed to address) what they
found in that zone.  

Put differently, the registrants in e164.arpa are there because
they are validated and authorized, while a registrant in COM is
there because they promise to put a few currency-units on the
table.   It seems to me that the same things that drive a
"validated and authorized" model into e164.arpa could be used to
justify a somewhat stronger set of rules to protect the user
base than has generally been the expectation for ICANN-delegated
gTLDs.

For many of the same reasons, I could imagine IAB and RIPE NCC
imposing a _requirement_ for signed zones on Tier 1 delegates
from e164.arpa, making schedules in conjunction with some
consensus among the Tier 1 registries, and holding those
registries to those schedules.

Again, whether there is consensus for doing any of these things,
and whether they are a good idea, are separate issues.  But
analogies with what a registry does or does not do in a gTLD
don't help illuminate the issues, IMO.

     john