[NA-Discuss] Protecting the public interest: dot-zip

[Jonathan Zuck]

Certainly seems worthwhile to me and outweighs the value of having a .zip domain

Jonathan Zuck
Director, Future of Work Project
Innovators Network Foundation
www.InnovatorsNetwork.org

________________________________
From: Evan Leibovitch <evan at telly.org>
Sent: Sunday, May 28, 2023 8:09:11 PM
To: Jonathan Zuck <JZuck at innovatorsnetwork.org>
Cc: NARALO Discussion List <na-discuss at atlarge-lists.icann.org>
Subject: Re: [NA-Discuss] Protecting the public interest: dot-zip

Very likely the name collision assessment came up clean -- against other domains.
But that's not the issue here.
Is there any requirement for applicants to do due diligence regarding collisions with other common non-DNS computer uses of the applied string?

There are some precedents, notably dot-onion being unavailable to reduce collision with the TOR network (which is certainly out of ICANN's jurisdiction).
But I don't know if, for instance, there would be any inherent ICANN-based opposition to anyone applying for, say, dot-exe or dot-bat (which, like zip, is also a dictionary word).

Perhaps there is room to develop advice to have a mechanism that measures evaluates conflict not just with other domains, but also common computer uses that could if implemented cause pubic confusion or harm.
There are a LOT of file extensions and not all need to be protected, but surely the most common file extensions (and perhaps also command-line utilities) need protections.
I see that dot-run is delegated, which could affect Linux systems (which run a lot of the Internet's infrastructure).
So is dot-mov which is a popular Apple file extension for videos.

Anyway, I leave it with NARALO's ALAC reps to determine if this issue is sufficiently end-user to care about and investigate.

Evan Leibovitch, Toronto Canada
@evanleibovitch / @el56


On Sun, May 28, 2023 at 7:35 PM Jonathan Zuck <JZuck at innovatorsnetwork.org<mailto:JZuck at innovatorsnetwork.org>> wrote:
I wonder what sort of risk assessment .ZIP has for the name collision study.

Jonathan Zuck
Director, Future of Work Project
Innovators Network Foundation
www.InnovatorsNetwork.org<http://www.InnovatorsNetwork.org>

________________________________
From: NA-Discuss <na-discuss-bounces at atlarge-lists.icann.org<mailto:na-discuss-bounces at atlarge-lists.icann.org>> on behalf of Evan Leibovitch via NA-Discuss <na-discuss at atlarge-lists.icann.org<mailto:na-discuss at atlarge-lists.icann.org>>
Sent: Saturday, May 27, 2023 4:18:34 PM
To: NARALO Discussion List <na-discuss at atlarge-lists.icann.org<mailto:na-discuss at atlarge-lists.icann.org>>
Subject: [NA-Discuss] Protecting the public interest: dot-zip

While my hopes that ALAC will champion this are dim, and ICANN itself is even less likely to act, I draw your attention to a policy goof that is already causing public harm and is likely to cause far more.

Now anyone can buy a dot-zip second-level domain, ie evan.zip or naralo.zip

As anyone who works with computers should know, long before dot-zip was a domain it was a very popular computer-file extension to denote something that contained a file (or collection of files) in compressed form. Such a collection could easily contain malicious data or code.

Is anyone seeing the problem? People could be sent "attachments" that are really URLs and URLs that are really attachments. The potential for end-user confusion and harm is immense.

Here are two videos that explain the situation well:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GCVJsz7EODA
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V82lHNsSPww

Is anyone in domain-world looking at this?

Evan Leibovitch, Toronto Canada
@evanleibovitch / @el56
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