An independent report commissioned by ICANN, Mitigating the Risk of DNS Namespace Collisions, has offered a set of concrete recommendations on how to mitigate potential risks of domain name collisions
A name collision occurs when an attempt to resolve a name used in a private name space results in a query to the public Domain Name System (DNS).
“This report takes an in-depth look at the collision issue and the potential risks and impacts, and gives us some very clear advice aimed at how to help system operators detect and mitigate those risks,” said Akram Atallah, President of ICANN’s Global Domains Division. “The next step is to seek input from our community on the report’s findings.”
The report stressed that name collisions are nothing new and that any issues that arise from expansion of the Top-Level Domains (TLDs) under ICANN’s New gTLD program would resemble those that occur in other parts of the DNS. But the report noted that expanding the number of TLDs will not fundamentally or significantly increase the risks of name collisions.
Specifically, the study outlines a set of recommendations on how ICANN and the TLD operators should handle the issue of name collisions in the expanding TLD space:
ICANN should require new TLD registries to implement and publish a 120-day controlled interruption zone monitored by ICANN immediately upon delegation in the root zone.
After the 120-day period, there shall be no further collision-related restrictions on the TLD.
ICANN should have emergency response processes to analyze and act upon reported problems that present “clear and present danger to human life”.
ICANN and others in the community should continue to collect and analyze data relating to the root servers and to the controlled interruption.
The Top-Level Domains .corp, .home and .mail should be permanently reserved.
The report is posted for public comment until April 21, 2014.
Here is some of the more interesting finding and recommendations from the report:
We do not find that the addition of new Top Level Domains (TLDs) fundamentally or significantly increases or changes the risks associated with DNS namespace collisions. The modalities, risks, and etiologies of the inevitable DNS namespace collisions in new TLD namespaces will resemble the collisions that already occur routinely in the other parts of the DNS. The addition of multiple new TLDs over the past decade (generic and country code) has not suggested that new failure modalities might exist; rather, the indication is that the failure modalities are similar in all parts of the DNS namespace.…
