Zone Transfers Summary of CENTR Position

1
Zone TransfersSummary of CENTR Position

• Kim Davies
• ICANN Shanghai
• 27 October 2002

2
The Issue

• ICANN requires ccTLD Managers to provide access
  to the zone files via AXFR before they will allow
  any change to their nameserver delegations.

3
History

• Issue arose in April/May
• CENTR asks ICANN to explain policy on 21 June
• CENTR issues initial paper at ICANN Bucharest on
  25 June
• ICANN responds in the form of an FAQ on 4
  September
• CENTR issues position paper on 26 September.

4
CENTR Response

• No technical justification
• Causes undesirable consequences
• Legally questionable

5
Technical Justification

• Check for 2 NS requirement for second levels
• Outside ICANN scope
• Possibly outdated requirement
• Not a large impact on global stability, certainly
  not more important than having a correct
  delegation of a ccTLD
• Check that zone file complies with STD13 format
• Latest versions of BIND break this format
• Zone file received via AXFR can differ to that on
  the server
• Real errors (syntactic, semantic) errors are
  already detected by name servers before loaded.
• Many name servers have no zone file.
• Dynamic DNS means data served can (and usualy
  does) differ from the zone file.

6
Legal Issues

• ICANN is performing data escrow.
• We consider this a local issue, subject to local
  laws.
• Data protection laws
• Prohibits release of some data.
• Empowers ccTLDs not to release some data.
• The parts give you less than the whole
• Ranking ISPs
• New products?

7
Problems for ICANN

• If they want to do data escrow
• Places huge burden on them when they actually
  take over a ccTLD
• Doesnt sound like a technical co-ordination
  role.
• If they want to monitor the DNS
• The simple (important) stuff is not being done.
• Checking the second level is beyond their scope
• Do they plan on checking the whole DNS?
• Their operations should stem from
• The IANA contract with the US Government, which
  mentions nothing about enforcing unrelated
  requirements before allowing NS redelegation.
• The MoU which says nothing about a requirement to
  perform technical monitoring of ccTLDs.

8
Conclusion

• We disagree

9
Future

• ICANN has been speaking to those who have an
  issue.
• Most redelegations have gone through.
• Many ccTLDs have committed to working on policy
  development on this topic and/or performing
  technical tests on their own zones and reporting
  only the results back to ICANN.
• Another proposal has been circulating on using an
  independent trusted third party to perform any
  agreed tests.
• But No change in stated ICANN policy.

10

• kim_at_centr.org
• The End.