[council] Draft Names Council motion on IDN

[Elisabeth Porteneuve <Elisabeth.Porteneuve@cetp.ipsl.fr>]

Council,

This is revised text of motion on IDN.

I would appreciate comments from all of you, before we forward
this motion to the Board.
Time is of essence, we have less than 3 days.

Thank you,
Elisabeth

--
DRAFT names Council motion on IDN (version v3).


1. Whereas the technical work by the IETF (Internet Engineering Task Force)
   is at the basis of Internet developments, and recognized as
   such by the worldwide community and by ICANN;

2. Whereas the IETF IDN (International Domain Names) engineers have 
   determined twelve items to be defined  at the technical level before 
   the ML (Multi-Lingual) domain names should be used in order to preserve 
   globally unique naming in a universally resolvable public name space;

3. Whereas only an important but insufficient element in the encoding scheme
   has been published to date by the IETF and that element only as a draft;

4. Whereas there cannot be an open competition at an application level
   without all the IDN specifications completed and published;

5. Whereas the deployment of IDN space in countries using non ASCII
   characters is an order of magnitude higher than in
   English-speaking countries, because  it impacts on inherent culture;

6. Whereas the introduction of IDN names must have careful,
   worldwide coordination across all TLD space to avoid political battles, 
   a profusion of encoding prefixes and corresponding confusion;

7. Whereas it is critical to understand how the whois accessible
   databases for IDN would function for gTLD and ccTLD alike;

8. Whereas the International Treaty Organizations, WIPO and ITU, are
   planning a joint Symposium on Multilingual Domain Names in Geneva,
   December 6 and 7, 2001;

9. Whereas the domain name system is a key infrastructure component
   of the Internet and ICANN is committed to preserve the stability
   and security of this worldwide resource;

The Names Council advises that having multiple and non-interoperable
implementations in the DNS has the potential to be harmful for the 
stability and securty of the DNS.

The Names Council therefore calls upon the ICANN Board to take the 
necessary steps to :
  a. stop the transformation of the VeriSign IDN "testbed" under 
     dot com/org/net into active domain names in the Root until such 
     time as the IETF standards be completed;
  b. stop the transformation of any other known TLD IDN "testbed"
     into active domain names in the Root until such
     time as the IETF standards be completed;