Re: [registrars] IDN's moving forward

[Rick H Wesson <wessorh@ar.com>]

all:

Registrars should understand that VeriSign is now working outside of the
IETF's idn working group. Recently the idn working group has started a
straw poll to decide if IDNA ( a *ACE based approach) is the direction we
want to head. The vote is not in and the IETF *MAY* not decide to use RACE
or any ACE based IDN solution. It is also unclear that ICANN has blessed
this action.

Also not that the -go-live-date is a day when many top level managers will
be en-route to Stockholm, just as the initial Multilingual testbed was
started the day before the ICANN meeting in November 2000. Remember the
havoc?

In short what this means is that the domains Registrars are selling MAY
become obsolete and some may become invalid or illegal encodings. If the
IETF decides to go with IDNA, they certainly will pick a different ACE
which means all RACE encoded domains will.

   an example for the technically challenged:
     your company has sole 50,000 bq--***** domains.
     you will have to notify all those registrants and tell them
     that their name has changed to zz--***** (further more
     the **** part of the domain will be DIFFERENT!

The decision that VeriSign has made only shows their further disregard for
the IETF and its standards setting processes. If you put your faith in
VeriSign be prepared to notify ALL OF YOUR customers, at some point in
the future, that their domain name has changed and is now something
completely different. Can you imagine a worse customer support nightmare?

Be warned, the multilingual snake oil that is being liberally spread
into the fine oiled machinery of Internet infrastructure may cost your
organizations great sums of time and money to correct.

I do not condone the behavior of the VeriSign registry and advise swift
action from the active multilingual enabled registrars. Don't let the
allure of a quick buck distract you from the multilingual glue that will
cause your organization cease in a morass of customer support issues,
caused by a prematurely deployed Internet-Draft protocol.


-rick

On Tue, 22 May 2001, Ross Wm. Rader wrote:

> VRSN has today indicated that they will be moving forward with phase 3.3 of
> their IDN "test-bed" largely as a result of the recent survey that they
> conducted.
>
> I would like to start a discussion here concerning whether or not you feel
> that your organization's wishes, and those of your customer's, are
> appropriately represented as a result of this survey.
>
> For the record, I do not believe that the result of the survey was wholly
> representative of the wishes of our clients or our firm. Also for the
> record, please note that I am happy to chalk this up to Tucows casting a
> minority vote in the survey if this discussion indicates that registrars are
> generally happy with the results of the "vote".
>
> Thanks,
>
> -rwr
>
>
>
> Tucows Inc.
> t. 416.538.5492
>