File formats:

Status:

INFORMATIONAL

Authors:

J. Rosenberg, Ed.
IAB

Stream:

IAB

Cite this RFC: TXT  |  XML  |   BibTeX

DOI:  https://doi.org/10.17487/RFC4367

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Abstract

The Domain Name System (DNS) provides an essential service on the Internet, mapping structured names to a variety of data, usually IP addresses. These names appear in email addresses, Uniform Resource Identifiers (URIs), and other application-layer identifiers that are often rendered to human users. Because of this, there has been a strong demand to acquire names that have significance to people, through equivalence to registered trademarks, company names, types of services, and so on. There is a danger in this trend; the humans and automata that consume and use such names will associate specific semantics with some names and thereby make assumptions about the services that are, or should be, provided by the hosts associated with the names. Those assumptions can often be false, resulting in a variety of failure conditions. This document discusses this problem in more detail and makes recommendations on how it can be avoided. This memo provides information for the Internet community.

For the definition of Status, see RFC 2026.

For the definition of Stream, see RFC 8729.