Non-English Domain Names Likely Delayed

Mon Jul 18 21:55:08 UTC 2005

On 18-jul-2005, at 22:49, Brad Knowles 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.

Maybe one day I'll tell you about the early days of SIDN. No  
government in sight. I know this has changed a bit, but it's mostly  
rubber stamping what was happening already. I'm fairly sure it's the  
same way for most ccTLDs.

> 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.

I don't believe the major TLDs with million+ names registered are  
short sighted enough to think it's a good idea 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.

Apparently there's only one way that really works, so everyone will  
be doing the same thing, save for some details maybe.

> 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.

Too bad standards don't crop up over night. But it would be helpful  
if the IETF (or another standards organization?) would do something  
here.

>     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.

Remember the Bell standards? ANSI, DIN? You have to with what works,  
especially in security where the cost of doing it wrong or delaying  
the solution can be very high.

>>  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 @$$?

Ok then, what else is the dominant profession amongst (wannabe)  
internet governance types?

>>  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?

Buy some books at oreilly.com?

>     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?

Hopefully they make this stuff user configurable. This stuff is a lot  
like SSL certificates that come with browsers. You can manage those  
yourself if you jump through the hoops.

It's not so much that many people will actually do this, but the fact  
that users can vote with their feet keeps the people in control down  
the chain honest. (Well, more honest than they would be otherwise, at  
least.)

You can't have an effictive dictatorship when people are free to move  
to the next country.