Re: IAB letter on IDNs and VeriSign

--On Tuesday, 28 January, 2003 13:27 +0900 Soobok Lee 
<[email protected]> wrote:

> <quote>
> [14] At the core of all of the IAB's concerns is the
> architectural principle that the DNS is a lookup service which
> must behave in an interoperable, predictable way at all levels
> of the DNS hierarchy. Furthermore, as a lookup service it is
> such a fundamental part of the Internet's infrastructure that
> converting it to an application-based search service, as the
> deployed system does, is not appropriate even in the case
> where the query presented would not normally map to a
> registered domain. </quote>
>
> I have to accept IAB's concerns about VGRS solutions. But,  if
> such solutions will be timedout and  phased out after 2 years
> and operated with care under IAB's new "operational
> guidelines", those harms can be minimized, while it will give
> great boostup to plugins distributions. I expect ICANN will
> consider the  bright side of the solutions and make balanced
> decisions. Many asian region  NICs are considering to   put
> even non-ASCII labels in their zone (not IDNA-compatibile)
> with slightly different approaches, even after they become
> fully aware of those caveats behind their approaches.

> IDNA/stringprep/nameprep introduce confusions,collisions and
> uncertainty to the DNS systems much more  than VGRS specific
> implementation/deployment solutions does ,as explained in
> ICANN BoD's last resolutions in  Shanghai..

Soobok,

With the understanding that I'm not on the IAB any more and did 
not participate in the writing of that statement...

First, designing anything for the Internet on the assumption 
that it will be deployed and then "phased out after 2 years" 
just doesn't recognize reality.  We have had almost zero success 
in "phasing things out" when they are deployed only on servers. 
The problem is much worse when implementations require replacing 
software on client machines and the protocols are still vaguely 
operational.  Our last success in making a major and rapid 
phase-out solution was the "phase out" of NCP. That was 20 years 
ago and with the benefit of credible threats to remove any host 
from the network which did not comply.

Second, there is no reason to predict that ICANN will do 
anything that is sensible, measured, and that shows a good 
understanding of either the technical or the policy issues of 
IDN deployment -- rather than just the short-term politics or 
agreement that internationalization is good.  Certainly the 
resolutions adopted in Shanghai should not be considered good 
news in this respect.  Those resolutions basically say "there is 
a problem, we should proceed carefully, and the lifetime of the 
so-far-ineffectual committee should be extended to work on it 
without changes that will make it more effective".

> IESG/IAB are
> willing to justify that IDNA by supplemental Registrations
> guidelines ? If IDNA can be justified in such a way, why not
> VGRS solutions ?   :-) Still I hope IAB can express such
> consistent conservatism  also to IDNA/nameprep itself, which is
> the source of all these hassles...

At the risk of reopening a debate that was never satisfactorily 
resolved, if the issue is merely one of permitting non-ASCII 
characters to be used in identifiers, with those identifiers 
being placed in DNS labels, IDNA is fine.  It may even be more 
complex and protective than is needed for that purpose (just as 
the LDH rules were more than is needed for strict identifier use 
in ASCII). To my knowledge, neither the IAB nor the IESG have 
taken a formal position on whether registration guidelines are 
either necessary or sufficient to resolve any presumed problems 
with IDNA.  If, by contrast, someone is expecting IDNA to solve 
the most general of user-interface searching and navigation 
problems, that expectation is completely unrealistic.  I think 
just about everyone knows that is the case at this stage, if 
only because it is clear that the DNS is inadequate to solve 
that problem for names that are restricted to ASCII.  Some 
marketing organizations might like to pretend otherwise, but 
that doesn't make success in use of the DNS as a general-purpose 
search environment any more likely.

So your point was?

    regards,
      john