[ih] Funny how things work out

[John Levine]

In article <509FD2CF-33E5-416F-B312-6E296E94A8BE at pch.net>,
Bill Woodcock via Internet-history <woody at pch.net> wrote:
>If anyone can shed any light on how the “only delegations” rule came to be, I’d love to hear the history there.

My recollection is that the issue is while single component names work
fine in the DNS, they work rather badly in applications. Many ccTLDs
have A or MX records at the top level so you can try and see how badly
they work. Try the web sites at BH. or PN. or ponder the fact that GT.
has MX records pointing at Gmail. See RFC 7085.

Google asked for an exception to put an A record at SEARCH and ICANN
said no, both for technical reasons and it seemed rather anti-competitive.
They came back with a hack to let users pick their favorite search engine
(with a browser cookie as I recall) and the answer was still no.

The delegation-only rule isn't enforced very strictly. Lots of gTLDs
have signed orphan glue, .BIZ and .TRAVEL have a SRV records. Then
there's .NAME which has odd rules that let them put a lot of MX
records in their zone.

R's,
John
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