Skip to content

Domain name sovereignty

Created by: philarcher

IDR spec

The intro to proposed revised text in the IDR spec makes a number of assertions that are 'dangerous' in terms of the way the Web works.

A link type of DPP cannot be assumed to point to anything conformant with the UNTP spec. It might point to some other form of DPP entirely. Whether it is a Verifiable Credential or not is hinted at not by the link type but by the media type (which should be application/vc in our case). Even if the link type says dpp and the media type says application/vc it still can't be assumed to be a UNTP DPP. It might be some other form of DPP that is also a VC. On the Web, you don't know until you actually dereference the URL (GET it).

Likewise, it cannot be assued that just because there's a URL that looks like an ISO/IEC 18975-conformant URI with what look like valid identifiers, that it points to an IDR.

This is because domains are soverign over their URI space. This is codified in IETF's Best Current Practice 190 which basically says that the owner of a domain name can defined whatever URL they want on their domain.

Many years ago I created an example for this. 10.1103/PhysRevD.89.032002 is the Digital Object Identifier for the paper describing the discovery of the Higgs Bosun. Put that into any of the DOI resolver services like https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevD.89.032002 or https://dx.crossref.org/10.1103/PhysRevD.89.032002 and you'll get that paper. Irritating, pedantic and unhelpful as it may be I am perfectly within my rights to have established https://philarcher.org/10.1103/PhysRevD.89.032002 which returns a picture of a cat.

In brief:

  • If you're running a service that is expecting a particular form of URL and you receive one, go ahead and process it. It's probably what you want.
  • Be ready for a URL that looks like something you're expecting but turns out not to be
  • ISO/IEC 18975 makes use of the /.well-known/ method to declare that a service at a given domain name is a resolver (it requires that there is a Resolver Description File at {domain}/.well-known/resolver). See https://id.gs1.org/.well-known/gs1resolver for the GS1 version of this.
Edited by Harley Thomas