Adding .onion to the PSL?

[Ryan Sleevi]

I opened https://github.com/publicsuffix/list/issues/374 to hopefully capture discussion about what the cons are about adding .onion to the PSL (if any). Given that .onion is a bit of a special snowflake (or more aptly, a special-use snowflake), I wanted to make sure there was consensus on the path forward before making the change.

[dnsguru]

Just adding this note so it is present in the group list for historical purposes.

In looking through the discussion list and wanted to close out this one as it relates to the listing of domain names in compliance with ICP-3 and those names included in the Root Zone by the IANA or in contract with ICANN. 

We'd resisted the inclusion of .onion because the community volunteers for this PSL sought to not be drawn into the controversy or distraction of discussions around inclusion of alternate root strings that do not comply with ICP-3 [One Authoratative Root] when it was initially filed. 

Peter Koch documented some of the challenges of special use domains like this and .example in his blog post where the IETF reviewed special use domain names [https://www.ietfjournal.org/special-use-domain-names-a-registry-under-review/]

Any reticence to inclusion of .onion was eliminated after it was vetted by the IETF and defined in RFC 7686
[https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc7686].  At this point, the TLD is included in the Mozilla PSL