On 22-jul-04, at 12:44, Wilfried Woeber, UniVie/ACOnet wrote:
Blame the IAB. Apparently, they were the ones who created this mess by frivolously adopting ip6.arpa as a replacement for ip6.int.
. The reverse name tree for IPv4 is already located in the arpa. subtree. I cannot see any good reason why the same service for IPv6 should use a different TLD.
Simple: because it already is. Sure, it would have been better to have it under arpa from the start, but ip6.int was selected. Since this is a completely internal thing that doesn't show up in anything users ever see, there was no harm in that. Changing it to ip6.arpa on the other hand cost lots of money and even more confusion. It's almost criminal.
(Actually I don't see a good formal reason for not using in-addr.arpa. - but I presume that there are good technical reasons...)
That would be ambiguous, as 2.in-addr.arpa would both be 2.x.x.x in IPv4 and 2xxx:: in IPv6.