Re: [registrars] REALNAMES - stopping service 30th June.

["Ross Wm. Rader" <ross@tucows.com>]

>
> I disagree. Open standards are good if they are ever set. You know as well
> as I do that the IETF has been dicking around with the IDN issue for
almost
> 2 years now.

As they should be. I'm much more comfortable with a standards track that
requires the input of many informed individuals over a longer period of time
than I am with a half-baked idea that someone cooked up in their basement.
Witness the technical differences between RRP and EPP (even at this
relatively early stage of development for EPP) for instance. Open standards
aren't standards until a bunch of people agree that they are - then a bunch
more need to implement it, but only if the first bunch did their work.

Solving the "IDN problem" is relatively trivial compared to solving the "how
do we make this work for the whole internet" problem.

>
> > Stop-gap solutions such as the I-DNS service, the Realnames shim and
> others
> > in the space need to be displaced by open standards before true adoption
> can
> > occur. If it is indeed the case that Realnames exit is/will impact the
> VGRS
> > MDNS implementation, then the entire industry has suffered a setback -
not
> > something that I'd like to repeat in the near future.
>
> You are completely misguided. Even if an open standard was set today, it
> would take a long, long time before all applications are upgraded to
support
> IDN's.
>

Precisely. And if the registries keep ramming half-baked solutions down our
throat in the meantime, we can expect a lot more customer disappointment and
economic uncertainty.

-rwr