In the current round of expansion of the root zone, a number of applications appear to conflict with private name spaces that are actually in use on the Internet. This talk presents an overview of a procedure that allows evaluation of when it is "safe" to delegate a name, given that risk of conflict. The procedure begins with the assumption that the Interisle report to ICANN ("Name Collision in the DNS") reveals roughly three categories of potential conflicts: those of no substantial risk, those of considerable risk, and those of extreme risk.
Using that assumption, the procedure offers a way to measure the point at which candidate labels can move to the category of "no substantial risk". For a given candidate label, the procedure requires delegation of the candidate to specially-instrumented name servers that will respond only to queries consistent with the procedure. Advertisements
are to be placed on the Internet that include a URI with a host part inside the candidate namespace. As a control, another URI with a host part inside a normally-delegated namespace is also included in the advertisement. By comparing the frequency of queries inside the candidate namespace to the frequency of queries inside the normal delegation, it is possible to determine whether queries inside the candidate namespace has reached the level of noise. At that point, the candidate label can move to the category of "no substantial risk".