The thesis, advanced below, is that "domain name" contains within it an unambiguous limitation on the scope of the Corporation's policy making capability, which "a sequence of labels" does not. On 11/25/15 3:29 PM, Andrew Sullivan wrote:
... I'm also more than a little worried about the "sequences of labels" thing, since that re-opens the issue of where in the tree ICANN is supposed to stop, ...
"domain name" appears in rfc882 (Jake Feinler et alia's work circa 1983), which incorporates the "host" language of the earlier rfc608 and rfc606 (Peter Deutsch's work at SRI a decade earlier). For the thesis that "domain name" contains some limitation on the scope of the contractor co-publishing, with another government contractor, a tree (earlier, a table), we should be able to find that limitation in some subsequent rfc. In the alternative, if a "domain name" is distinct from "a sequence of labels", in the sense that the former necessarily exists within a tree co-published by US government contractors, and the latter does not, then the string "icann.org" is a domain name, associated with the address 192.0.43.7, when resolved from, for the purposes of illustration, some device in Los Angeles, as that resolution is made relative to the tree co-pubished by US government contractors. The same string "icann.org", is necessarily _not_ a domain name, though also associated with the address 192.0.43.7, when resolved from, for the purposes of illustration, some device in Beijing, as that resolution is made relative to the tree not published by US government contractors (though the USG tree and the PRC tree differ on only a minute number of "strings", and without loss of generality we can assume that all such differences are strings which appear only in the PRC tree, generally associated with Han Script entries added to the PRC tree between 2005 and 2010). So, in what rfc may I find either the association of a limitation on scope within the government contractor published tree, or an association to the government contractor published tree and no tree published by some other party, for "domain name", which of necessity is absent, in one or the other or both parts, for "a sequence of labels"? An appeal to the "average reader" is of course, answerable, if and only if, the nuances of terms of art, whether they arise from the applicable technology or from the applicable law, are also all that is necessary in the text we, and not some random collection of "average readers", are attempting to write, nominally for some rather serious purpose. Eric Brunner-Williams Eugene, Oregon