Redacting .home from HNCP
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Internet
Home Networking
This document updates the Home Networking Control Protocol, eliminating the
recommendation for a default top-level name for local name resolution.
The Homenet working group has defined a mechanism for sharing information between
homenet routers, in Home Networking Control Protocol .
That document recommends the use of the ".home" top-level name as a
locally-resolved domain name.
RFC7788 did not follow the process defined in Special Use Domain Names
, or specify how other software should deal
with the allocated name. It is likely that, had this process been followed, it
would not have been possible to gain consensus on the use of '.home' as the
locally-resolved special-use top-level name for homenets, because this name is
known to be informally in use by sites on the internet, and the use to which this
name has been put is not well documented; it is impossible to say that there are
no conflicting uses for the name, and so getting consensus to use it anyway would
have been controversial, time consuming, and possibly futile.
The RFC6761 process is not well-understood within the IETF, and the authors of
RFC7788 were not aware of it. Normally, authors are not expected to know all
there is to know about IETF process, and IETF leadership, specifically working
group chairs, area directors and directorate members are expected to engage in a
review process that notices oversights of this sort.
Unfortunately, in the case of RFC7788, none of the people who should have caught
the missing RFC6761 reference did catch it, and RFC 7788 was published as a
consensus document that uses '.home' without ever reserving it in the RFC6761
Special-Use Domain Names registry.
This document updates RFC 7788: '.home' MUST NOT be used as the default name for
resolution within the home network. The new default value is specified in