Re: [council] Motion on International Domain Names

["Milton Mueller" <Mueller@syr.edu>]

Voting on this seems to be extremely 
premature. There has been minimal 
discussion. The issues are complex.

Here is the operational portion of the proposed
resolution:

"The Names Council therefore calls upon the ICANN 
Board to take the necessary steps to delay the 
transformation of any TLD IDN "testbed"
into active domain names in the Root until such time 
as the IETF standards be completed"

Would someone care to tell me what steps are
"necessary" to stop registries that don't have
contracts with ICANN from offering services?

Would someone care to tell me what steps are
"necessary" to stop registries that DO have
contracts with ICANN from offering services?

Are these "steps" better or worse than the
proposed problem? 

Another question you may not have considered:
what if the IETF standardisation process is 
NEVER completed? IETF recently abandoned 
efforts to standardize instant messaging; 
it gave up on URIs. Some standards just don't
go anywhere. What then? 

> DRAFT names Council motion on IDN (final version v4).
> >
> > 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.
> >
> >
> > --
> 
>