[council] MULTILINGUAL TEST BED DISCUSSION

["Cochetti, Roger" <RCochetti@verisign.com>]

Elizabeth and Milton-

On behalf of VGRS, and not necessarily the gTLD Constituency, I want to
clear up some confusion regarding the proposed resolution on IDN services.

To avoid confusion, the ICANN contract with VGRS that was in effect through
May of this year did not provide ICANN with authority over the introduction
of new VGRS services. Consequently, the VGRS multilingual testbed, which was
introduced in the Fall of last year, was introduced under a contract that
did not provide ICANN with the review rights that Elizabeth has described. 

Accordingly, for the past year, VGRS has agreed with both
voluntarily-participating registrars and voluntarily-participating
registrants to provide them with testbed services as described in its
announcements of last year.  And quite a few registrars and registrants have
voluntarily signed up to participate under these terms.

Moreover, with full knowledge of VGRS' plans, the ICANN Board has, as
recently as it Stockholm meeting, acknowledged VGRS' plans and indicated
that it wished to be kept advised of VGRS' progress on their implementation.


To suggest now, after the VGRS testbed 

**was fully and publicly described over a year ago; and

**was discussed at least two ICANN Board meetings, with no request for a
suspension from AFNIC or the ccTLD Constituency; and

**has been in operation for a year; and

**has attracted the support of a large number of registrars and registrants

that the testbed should somehow be suspended is, I believe, neither
responsive to the community nor a responsible way to deal with the
registrants, registrars and the registry that have worked together in this
testbed.  If AFNIC or the ccTLD Constituency wanted to propose a suspension,
then the proper time to have done so would not be a year after thousands of
contracts for testbed service have been entered into.

The VeriSign Registry has made clear from the outset that it will migrate to
the IETF standard for IDN when that standard is finalized and that in the
testbed it will employ standards that facilitate that migration.  So there
is simply no question over whether the VGRS IDN service will be
non-standards-based.

Finally, the competitive issue is important, or it should be to anyone
concerned about both standards and the integrity of the root.  Anyone
familiar with the global market for domain name registration services
understands that there is considerable pent up demand for non-ASCII
registration services; and this demand will simply not wait for years or
even months to be served.  For this reason, quite a few registration service
providers who are not affiliated with ICANN have launched multilingual
services and quite a few more will do so.  These service providers have
little interest in any Names Council resolutions and they will continue to
serve the market as aggressively as they can.  Their success cannot possibly
achieve the objectives of this draft resolution.

The draft resolution, in my view, is ill-informed; of questionable legality;
and -if it ever achieved its immediate stated intent- would promote exactly
the opposite of respect for standards.

Roger      

    

Roger J. Cochetti
Senior Vice-President & Chief Policy Officer
VeriSign
(202) 973-6600
rcochetti@verisign.com