On 7 May 2021, at 17:27, Randy Bush <randy@psg.com> wrote:
In particular, the committee proposes amending the scope of the directive to include:
"authoritative domain name resolution services as a service procurable by third-party entities”.
for those of nor steeped in european commission speak, could you please describe in internet terms the dns operators and users included in and excluded from this set?
Hey Randy, Just realised I had not responded yet, noticed a few others already gave their interpretation. As with your other response, I am also not al lawyer and I certainly recommend peopler to seek proper legal advise on these, especially of you think that your business or income might depend on the outcome. In that case also please make sure to take the whole of proposal into consideration, DNS is only a small subset of services and operators that would be in scope. Agree it is not the most beautiful piece of prose ever written, but it does the trick. The way I, as a layman, have understood this sentence to work is that if you put a sign up the door saying "host your DNS zones with me, only X money" you are likely to fall within this definition: you are allowing other people to buy (procure) this service of you and you would be running authoritative DNS servers for that service. This in contrast to somebody who registers a domain and points the NS and glue records to a server they would operate for their own benefit and sell this as a service to others. Now of course that would leave some providers in scope, but those operators might find that other parts of the proposal would also bring them into scope, regardless of whether they are defined as a DNS service provider. As a purely hypothetical example, but if you are a larger-than-life hosting provider and find that 30% of a country's webshops run on your platform, there might be other parts that could define you as critical or essential. As to the other point you and few others seem to raise: recursive resolvers. These are not addressed by this specific clause, but are defined in the sentence above, which is not changed from the original proposal. Again, taking into account the bigger picture, I'd assume that many of the access providers who operate such a service for their users, will be in scope for other reasons than running a DNS service. On the contentious point of how to interpret the resolver/forwarder that comes as part of the CPE. There are discussions elsewhere on whether your modem forms part of the "internet access" product or not. You can probably argue that it would trickle down from the access provider, especially in cases where the CPE is under their management. But again, I am not an expert in this area and are happy to refer you to those who are and ask them for a proper legal analysis. Regards, MarcoH