On 16 Nov 2023, at 12:53, Andrew McConachie <andrew.mcconachie@icann.org> wrote:
The report focuses on Referential Integrity (Section 6) since name uniqueness isn't all that important of a property. For example, mDNS names are not unique. They may be locally unique, but they're certainly not globally unique. Also, even between naming systems name uniqueness isn't always wanted. This is why Microsoft tells admins to have the same name in DNS and Netbios refer to the same computer. GNS intentially doesn't care about uniqueness, which can be seen as either a feature or a bug depending on your opinion.
I think another way of looking at this is that uniqueness is sometimes very important, but that the details matter. mDNS names are unique within the context of a multicast domain. Participating publishers of names go to some length to deal with conflicts and rename things to avoid them. It's important for a variety of reasons for names in the public DNS to be unique, e.g. since there are security and commercial consequences if they are not. It is not necessarily important that a name be unique in the union of the public DNS and a particular organisation's internal DNS namespace. A company might decide that in their internal namespace COMPANY.COM means one thing whereas to the rest of the world COMPANY.COM means something different. That's up to them, and perhaps that's intentional, desirable and good. But in other cases uniqueness is quite important, e.g. in the case of companies who squatted on the DEV top-level domain internally for years and then woke up one morning to find there were important things on the Internet now named under .DEV that they couldn't reach. I am not convinced that it's a good starting point to say that uniqueness is (generally) not important. I think it's a better starting point to acknowledge that it is sometimes vital, sometimes inconsequential and usually difficult to generalise about. I think that makes thinking about uniqueness important. I have not read the document. I am responding to just that idea above, which has been a good reminder that I should go and read the document because I will surely learn something. Joe