> There was a very large, um, "discussion" about whether or not there should be a registration system for alternate spaces when many of the alternate spaces were being specifically designed because they hated registration systems in the first place.

Presumably what they hated was registration requirements.

If I need some namespace for my open source project, I can go and register a top level domain for it and all I have to do is pay $185,000 and shepherd it through a complex bureaucratic process and then pay $25,000/year forever. So corporations with more money than they know what to do with have their own top level domain that they don't even use for anything but small projects can't register one at all. Then there is nothing telling anyone else that they should pick a different TLD if they don't want a collision, and you create a default where new projects have to start out using unregistered namespace and then continue to use it as they start to get bigger.

Meanwhile you could have what amounts to an append-only wiki with some basic rules like "if your purpose needs multiple names, you get one TLD and put the rest under it" and "you have to register it again every 10 years if you're still using it". Then you wouldn't have two different things trying to use .wallet because one would have registered it first and the other would know to use something else.

> The real value (entirely IMHO) with .alt as a separation is that it allows people to figure out when they're communicate about why person A can't access the resources that person B has referred them to, is that when it ends in .alt it points toward "oh, I need to look somewhere else than the DNS" vs when it's under a TLD you'd have to know which are alternate spaces and which are not (for each person too -- see the gnu DNS also).

This seems like it would be pretty easy to look up if there was a namespace registry (and is already going to make you suspicious of this if you don't recognize the TLD), and doesn't work for the many things that already exist and don't use .alt.

> So.... let's say they don't reject them and you send a alternate name space query to a resolver that doesn't understand that alternate name space? You're still going to end up with a failed lookup, and thus just leaking alternate space queries to the DNS that can never resolve. This will look just like a rejection, but with a longer delay.

Except that the resolver might understand that alternate namespace. Suppose that OpenNIC started registering names under .alt, e.g. under .nic.alt, as this implies that they should instead of creating new TLDs. If they're the only ones using .nic.alt, recursive nameservers in general should be able to add the OpenNIC servers to their root hints and then be able to resolve those names, but now the stub resolvers will throw away the queries that might have succeeded.

> Alternate name spaces need alternate resolution mechanisms (by design), so software that wants to support both will need to figure out where that split point is so they can switch from one resolution system to another when needed.

And telling the stub resolvers to throw away the queries prevents that point from being in the upstream resolver. Most anything resolving names to IP addresses should be able to do that. You add support for it to e.g. your WiFi router or the recursive DNS resolver your company uses and then everything on your network can resolve those names.

> The real thing is: why are alternate spaces even caring whether or not they look like the DNS and have a TLD?

Because they want to be supported by existing software. If your upstream DNS server is configured to support OpenNIC or Namecoin or what have you then you can just type those names into your unmodified browser or ssh client etc. and they get resolved.

There are many things that only want to provide an alternative to ICANN and don't have any need to provide an alternative to IP addresses or the way client applications issue name resolution queries.