NamespaceSquatting

From W3C Wiki

Namespace Squatting is the practice of defining and/or using previously unused terms in someone else's namespace without their permission. It's a special case of UriSpaceSquatting.

For example:

  (Copy from older NamespaceHijacking, or something)

Things like this have actually happened:

  Namespace squatting: please don't DanConnolly Sep 14 2000

There are several problems with this practice:

1. Squaters can't really know that a name is unused when they start to use it.

  Someone else may be squating the same name already, or the owner may be using
  it in private.

1. If they owner later wants to use the term, there is a risk of conflict

  with content authored using the squater's ontology.

1. Without a namespace document, users wont have any place to look for

  an authoritative description of what a term
  means.  

The first two drawbacks can be arbitrarily reduced by using suitably chosen names, such as ones containing 128-bit cryptographically random numbers.

bash-2.05b$ dd if=/dev/random bs=16 count=1 2> /dev/null | uuencode -m - | head -2 | tail -1 | cut -c1-22
iuzfq2RO9BzdIfyleelIeQ

Issues:

1. Is there anything in any IETF or W3C specification which forbids this practice?
2. Should there be? Which Specs? RFC:2616?