The Swedish Internet Foundation The Swedish Internet Foundation The Swedish Internet Foundation Edgemoor Research Institute This document introduces a standardized mechanism for zone owners to signal their intent regarding DNS provider responsibilities through DNS itself. It defines two new DNS RRtypes -- HSYNC (Horizontal Synchronization, per-provider enrollment) and HSYNCPARAM (zone-wide multi-provider policy) -- that together enable zone owners to designate which Providers are authorized to serve and/or sign their zones, control whether Providers or the zone owner manages the NS RRset, and specify zone transfer chain configurations. The HSYNC and HSYNCPARAM records allow DNS Providers to discover each other and establish secure communication, either using the JOSE framework over DNS or via a RESTful API secured by TLS. This provider-to-provider communication enables automated coordination for tasks such as NS RRset management and DNSSEC-related operations. The document describes how the Providers discover one another, establish secure communication, and maintain it with periodic keep-alives; this specification covers those discovery and communication-establishment aspects, while the on-the-wire framing of the messages the Providers exchange is defined in a companion document. While a distributed DNSSEC multi-signer architecture (similar to "model 2" in [RFC8901]) is an important application of this framework, the HSYNC-based signaling supports broader provider synchronization needs. TO BE REMOVED: This document is being collaborated on in Github at: https://github.com/johanix/draft-leon-dnsop-signaling-zone-owner- intent (https://github.com/johanix/draft-leon-dnsop-signaling-zone- owner-intent). The most recent working version of the document, open issues, etc, should all be available there. The authors (gratefully) accept pull requests.