Re: [ga] Internationalized Domain Names deployed

[Stephane Bortzmeyer <bortzmeyer@nic.fr>]

On Sat, Jun 21, 2003 at 12:20:24AM -0700,
 Jeff Williams <jwkckid1@ix.netcom.com> wrote 
 a message of 58 lines which said:

>    However I would add that this ICANN announcement
> is only about 2years behind the curve as several countries
> such as China have been using their own IDN characters
> for some time now as Wang Ti announced about two
> years ago and I copied to this GA forum...

Since the RFC describing IDN (RFC 3490 and companions) were issued
only in march 2003, it can mean only one thing: that the Chinese, if
this history is true, used a non-standard proprietary local technique
to do IDN. This is something very bad and one of the reasons why there
was no IDN in ".fr" yet: we wanted to wait for an international
standard, allowing technical interoperability.

Also, if you count as "IDN" every technique allowing Unicode
characters to be registered in domain names, standard or not, many
people already did it a long time ago, starting with Verisign for
".com".
 
Regarding the role of ICANN, I agree it is close to nil, but it is
another story. There is one big mistake in the following paragrah,
however:

>  So I find that this ICANN announcement only shows
> that the ICANN BoD, Staff, IETF, and other ICANN
> supporters are really just demonstrating their level
> of redundancy as well as distance behind the
> technological IT curve...

Why is IETF included here? The IDN standard is entirely developed
under the IETF umbrella. It was a very long and painful process, but
it worked. Attempts to promote proprietary techniques failed and all
their proponents switched to (or promised to switch to) the standard.

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