Re: what is the real problem?

I think that it might help to frame the problem of email addresses in 
the larger cultural context.

Globalization is a very real force that is bringing enormous changes -- 
some good, some bad -- to most human societies.  Many people from 
non-English-speaking (and particularly non-Western) cultures are afraid 
that their entire language and culture will be swept away by a 
techno-cultural wave of which the Internet is an irresistible symbol.  
Kids in the developing world think of English as the language of the 
Net, and the Internet architecture itself is widely perceived as saying 
"speak English or live in a second-class ghetto."  And then there's 
email addresses, which add the ultimate insult to this injury, telling 
a majority of the world's people that, in essence, they have to change 
their names -- or at least the way they write them -- if they want to 
play the Internet game.

I restate this perception in the belief that an analysis of the 
underlying dynamic sheds light on the appropriate goals.  We need to 
mute the cultural hegemony implied by making people essentially rename 
themselves for email in their own language.  But that doesn't mean we 
have to pretend we're unaware of the unique and still growing role 
played by English in the world, nor of the important technical role 
ASCII plays as the minimal and universal character set supporting the 
primary language of international communication.

In that light, I see no reason to expand the IMA goal to some of the 
extremes I have heard mentioned.  If you have person A who speaks only 
Korean and person B who speaks only Hindi, I really don't think we need 
to worry much about how they enter/input *each other's* email 
addresses, because they have nothing to say to each other anyway, 
lacking a common language.  Making them refer to each other by 
latinized email addresses is simply no big deal if they don't speak a 
common language to begin with.  On the other hand, when a 
Korean-speaker and a Hindi-speaker *do* communicate, the odds are 
overwhelming -- and growing -- that they will do so in English, and 
will write down each other's names in latin characters, which they 
learned when they learned English.

I think, therefore, that we have to recognize the larger realities of 
global culture by restating the IMA goal as two distinct goals:

1.  People need to be able to use names in their own script when 
communicating with others who share their language.

2.  People need to be able to map (or at least alias) their personal 
names into the evolving shared language of global communication -- 
English-in-ASCII -- for communication across linguistic boundaries.

In particular, I think we can put aside considerations of whether the 
poor Mongolian peasant needs to learn ASCII -- the answer should be no 
if he only wants to communicate in Mongolian, but probably yes 
otherwise.  This is a non-technical reality, for the most part, which 
we can rely on in the standards.  We don't want to require ASCII for 
communication between two people who share a language, but it is 
completely legitimate to require it as a lingua franca for any 
cross-language communications.  (And yes, that means that Americans get 
lucky, but how surprising is that?)

Framing the problem this way, I think, makes the problem a tad more 
practical but has some interesting implications.  The person at the 
Korean keyboard is going to need to be able to use ASCII characters for 
communicating with non-Koreans, and can be expected (long term) to have 
access to the ASCII characters if he needs them.  However, this doesn't 
mean that he can even be expected to be able to type a name like Jose 
or Faelstroem correctly (as I just didn't), and his UI doesn't need to 
support typing email addresses in Farsi, either.  The real polyglots 
may end up with special multilingual software that helps them compose 
email address in multiple scripts, but most people will be completely 
satisfied with software that supports composing email addresses in two 
forms -- their own language, and ASCII.

My apologies if some of the above seems a tad obvious, but I don't 
think we've been clear about the goal.  It's silly to go from an 
ASCII-only namespace to one where all languages are treated completely 
equally, because that doesn't reflect the underlying realities about 
the evolution of English as an international language.  All languages 
deserve our respect and technical support, including the ability to use 
that language entirely for email within that linguistic community.  But 
English/ASCII will retain an vital role for communication across 
linguistic communities, and this reality can and should be reflected in 
our architectural considerations.  -- Nathaniel