Re: Re: Would not love to see reconsideration for domain and search

["John Levine" <johnl@iecc.com>]

>Note that ndots=1 search is rather harmless as long as ICANN has a
>prohibition on top-level domains resolving to an address.

That horse left the barn over 15 years ago:

https://www.rfc-editor.org/info/rfc7085

ICANN currently has a rule against it for generic TLDs, but they have
no control over two-letter country codes, and as our RFC notes, a lot
of ccTLDs have had A and MX records.

I say currently because Google asked for an exception to put an A
record to make http://search/ work, and it took some discussion before
ICANN said no.  The no was as much about anti-competitive reasons, the
default would be to Google's search engine, as the technical issues.
If someeone else asked, they'd probably say no, but it's not cast in
stone.

In response to another question about search order, the default value
of ndots is 1, so any domain name with at least one dot, such as
frodo.cs, is looked up directly before it tries a search list.  You
can set ndots to anything you want, but I expect that your users would
not be happy if gmail.com and yahoo.com could be shadowed by local host
names.

R's,
John

PS: Just for the record, the world's shortest e-mail address is n@ai.
I'm j@jl.ly, but that's almost twice as long.