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ALAC Statement on the Mitigating the Risk of DNS Namespace Collisions

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Date

Introduction

Julie Hammer, At-Large member from the Asian, Australian, and Pacific Islands Regional At-Large Organization (APRALO) and the ALAC Liaison to the SSAC, composed an initial draft of this Statement [PDF, 227 KB] after discussion of the topic within At-Large and on the Mailing Lists.

On 18 March 2014, this Statement was posted on the At-Large Mitigating the Risk of DNS Namespace Collisions Workspace.

On 21 March 2014, Olivier Crépin-Leblond, Chair of the ALAC, requested ICANN Policy Staff in support of the ALAC to send a Call for Comments on the Recommendations to all At-Large members via the ALAC-Announce Mailing List.

On 27 March 2014, this Statement was discussed in the ALAC and Regional Leadership Wrap-Up Meeting in Singapore. During that meeting, the draft Statement was discussed by all the At-Large members present at the meeting.

The Chair of the ALAC then requested that a ratification vote be held on the Statement. Staff then confirmed that the vote resulted in the ALAC endorsing the Statement with 15 votes in favor, 0 votes against, and 0 abstentions.

You may review the result independently under: https://community.icann.org/x/-irRAg.

Summary

  1. The ALAC welcomes the publication of the "Mitigating the Risk of DNS Namespace Collisions" study report by JAS Global Advisors but notes that at this stage, this report is incomplete.
  2. The ALAC notes the assumption on page 3 that "The modalities, risks, and etiologies of the inevitable DNS namespace collisions in the new TLD namespaces will resemble the collisions that already occur routinely in other parts of the DNS."
  3. The ALAC supports Recommendation 1 which proposes that the TLDs .corp, .home and .mail be permanently reserved for internal use, but considers that there are other potential TLD strings in high use in internal networks that should also be considered for reservation.
  4. The ALAC considers that Recommendation 3 sets too high a barrier for the application of emergency response options. In deeming that these responses be limited to situations which present a "clear and present danger to human life", this ignores a broad range of scenarios which may have huge detrimental impact.
  5. The ALAC reaffirms its view that security and stability should be paramount in the ongoing introduction of new TLDs and that the interests of Internet users, whether they be registrants of domain names in the new TLDs or users who are impacted by disruption to the smooth operation of internal networks, should be safeguarded.