RE: [registrars] IDN's moving forward

["Antony Van Couvering" <avc@nameengine.com>]

Dear Competition,

I find it highly ironic that Verisign would move forward with the next
phase of the multilingual testbed as a result of a straw poll of
registrars.  I approve of the idea of Verisign bowing to our desires,
but I suggest that you should mark this day on your calendars, because
such fine solicitude for the sentiments of the registrars has never been
heard of or seen before, and may never appear again. 

Less ironic, but just as telling, is that Registrar approval was never
one of the criteria for moving forward with this next step.  Here is
what Paul Hoffman says:

'VGRS stated earlier that the exit criteria for Phase 3.2 was 
"Availability of open source ACE toolkits for application 
developers." To date, no toolkit has appeared. There are ACE 
conversion routines, of course, but no toolkits. Because of this, 
there are literally no applications that support IDNA today.

'How can you move to Phase 3.3 when you have not even met your stated 
exit criteria for Phase 3.2?

'Further, VGRS said that the purpose of Phase 3.2 was "To enable those 
administering internationalized zones to identify issues relevant to 
the administration of zones containing ACE-encoded internationalized 
domain names." Well, one of those issues is that the standard is 
about to change.

'Now that this very significant issue has been identified, shouldn't 
VGRS spend the time to help the registrars prepare for the new 
encoding?'

At a recent teleconference, the registrars all agreed that one of the
changes we wanted inserted into the proposed (now real)
Verisign-ICANN-(DoC) agreement was a requirement that Verisign provide
120 (or was it 90?) days notice of new products.  Whether or not this
qualfies as a new product, it was pretty clear that the registrars that
days felt that the introduction of changes to the Registry without ample
explanation and warning were injurious and unjustified.

So NameEngine certainly feels that this "survey" doesn't represent our
point of view.

Antony

++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
Antony Van Couvering
CEO, NameEngine
401 Broadway, 26th Floor
New York, NY 10013
Tel +1 212 274-1960
Fax +1 212 214-0731
avc@nameengine.com
++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++


> -----Original Message-----
> From: Ross Wm. Rader [mailto:ross@tucows.com]
> Sent: Tuesday, May 22, 2001 10:47 PM
> To: Registrars List
> Subject: [registrars] IDN's moving forward
> 
> 
> 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
> 
>