Non-English Domain Names Likely Delayed

Mon Jul 18 20:49:12 UTC 2005

At 5:03 PM +0200 2005-07-18, Iljitsch van Beijnum wrote:

>>      The registry customers don't pay the bills of ICANN and the
>>  governments who maintain the ccTLDs.
>
>  Governments? You have some strange ideas about ccTLDs.

	Okay, fine -- government-authorized organizations, then.  Such as 
SIDN for .nl, DNS.be for .be, etc....  Like Verisign, they may well 
have to get their contracts renewed with the government.  Like 
Verisign, the people who pay the bills are not the end-user consumers 
of e-mail addresses and web browsers, and many of the bill-payers are 
likely to be the sort of people who would want to encourage confusion.

>  That's why it's good that browser vendors are keeping an eye on this.

	We definitely don't want the registries being the watchers in 
this case, but I also don't think we want to have a mish-mash 
hodge-podge of twelve zillion different solutions, each of which is 
being hard-coded into various different applications.  This is an 
area where we need to have some standards that can be broadly applied 
to all Internet and Internet-enabled applications, including web 
browsers.

	You wouldn't want Ford setting standards for roads, even if they 
could create an agreement with GM.  And you don't want each country 
setting their own universal standards, either.  That way lies madness.

>  Let the lawyers rule the world? Yeah right, that will help.

	Excuse me?  How on God's Bloody Green Earth did you pull that out 
of your @$$?

>  When the "governance" types get it right, sure, set up all the browsers
>  to take their cue. In the mean time, let's do what works today.

	Fine, so we get different implementations in every single browser 
and MUA and every other Internet-enabled program.  You get what you 
want.

>  Ultimately, the user should be in control (like I am with my named.root
>  file) but the vendors should set good defaults to help the users who
>  can't do this themselves.

	You're a customer of an ISP.  You know nothing about how to run 
your own nameserver.  Just how exactly do you expect to have control 
over your own named.root?

	If you're not a programmer with direct commit access to Mozilla 
and Opera, just how exactly do you expect to have any control over 
this process?

	Your personal example doesn't count here.  What counts is what 
the average user can do/is reasonably capable of.

-- 
Brad Knowles, <brad at stop.mail-abuse.org>

"Those who would give up essential Liberty, to purchase a little
temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety."

     -- Benjamin Franklin (1706-1790), reply of the Pennsylvania
     Assembly to the Governor, November 11, 1755

   SAGE member since 1995.  See <http://www.sage.org/> for more info.