[RSSAC Caucus] RSSAC Statement on Identification of Root Server Operators

[Paul Hoffman]

The recommendation in this statement seems quite reasonable: stop using the letters in public to identify RSOs. However, the text leading up to that has some of the same problems we discovered during the preparation of the metrics document and should definitely be cleaned up before publication. A few things to start:

- "A-root" is not a letter, it is a compounded name. I suspect that RSSAC wants to stop using both "A" and "A-root" for Verisign, but that is not yet clear in the document even though the statement actually includes the term "A-root".

- The statement says that using letters "detracted" from organizations but doesn't say how. I think most people who use the letters would find it surprising to say that the letters detract from the organizations.

- The term "future architectures" is confusing. I am guessing that it means "the names used for RSIs (as described in RSSAC028)", but it could also mean things like "rearchitecting the root server system". Maybe just change it to "future changes to RSI naming".

- There is no list of the organization's names to use when not using the letters. Without that, there will be inconsistent naming in documents. Two sources of names are given in the statement (https://root-servers.org/ and https://www.iana.org/domains/root/servers, but the names in those two lists differ in many small and large ways.

- The paragraph underneath the bold-face recommendation perpetuates something that many people in the Caucus have objected to in some of our documents, namely using all-caps for the NS records names (as in "A.ROOT-SERVERS.NET"). Doing so is both ugly and completely goes agains how domain names are used in all other documentation.

I hope this helps tomorrow's discussion.

--Paul Hoffman
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