Technology watch and standardization

Standardization is the basis of the Internet. It is this which allows one to freely choose software and be confident of interoperability with any other product which has been implemented  following standardization.

Standardization fields and contributions recognized

As the standardization of this or that technique (or rather lack of it) has essential consequences for the functioning of the Internet, AFNIC is not only a "consumer of standards" but actively participates in the development of future standards. There are many standards organizations (SDOs for Standards Development Organisation). AFNIC favors open SDO, that is to say:

• where all stakeholders can participate, at reasonable cost,

• where the standards development process is open, that is to say that everyone can follow what is happening in the SDO,

• where standards are distributed for free on the Internet,

• where these standards can be freely and implemented for free by all (eg in free software).

In practice, AFNIC is mainly involved in the IETF (Internet Engineering Task Force). An article in French with the operation of the IETF was written by an employee of AFNIC and presented to JRES 2007. There are other relevant SDO (such as W3C).

It is impossible to mention all the work carried out by employees of AFNIC. Note:

• RFC 3596 "DNS Extensions to Support IP Version 6" (co-author M. Souissi)

• and RFC 7626 "DNS privacy considerations" (author S. Bortzmeyer)

Technology Watch

AFNIC’s technology watch is not limited to the standardization. It follows everything that could, in a more or less near future, help to improve the service rendered by AFNIC, risk endangering the service, or could put into question the relevance of this service, the advantage of other services.

Covered areas

The IETF alone has very many areas of activity, from the BGP protocol to "cookies" for the web to the documentation of cryptographic algorithms. AFNIC, being primarily an operator of a public service, prefers to concentrate on areas close to its operating activities: DNS, EPP provisioning protocol, the databases access protocol RDAP. Without forgetting the areas that will affect its business such as security or routing (AFNIC manages, via BGP, an anycasted name server).

AFNIC Labs also  closely follows the security issues (in forums such as DNS-OARC, or security conferences such as Botconf as well as those related to naming and identification mechanisms.) Thus, in the future If a solution "alternative" to DNS seriously  emerges one day, it will not take us by surprise.

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