IDNAbis Goals

[Martin Duerst]

I have to say that I agree with Vint to some extent,
and with Marcos to some extent. See below for details.

At 05:35 06/12/02, Marcos Sanz/Denic wrote:
>Vint,
>
>> We probably should take into account as much as we are able the 
>registered domain names as opposed to those that might possibly 
>> have been registered under the earlier rules. Also, one wonders to what 
>extent those IDNs that have been registered have been part
>> of the domain name parking business as opposed to domain names for what 
>I will call functioning Internet destinations (not only 
>> web sites but other services also).

In the case of IDNs, one should be careful when talking about
"functioning destinations". There is a large number of registrations
that have been made in good faith, and that are just not activated
yet because before IE7 and before top level IDNs (the two main
milestones I identified for myself when attending the ICANN
meeting in Kuala Lumpur, about two years ago), deployment didn't
make sense. While it is difficult to find hard criteria to
distinguish these from domains that have just been bought
for speculation, there is clearly such a distinction.

>It may be that not many 
>registrations fall into the area of backward incompatibility.
>
>That is a new, broken definition of "backward incompatibility".
>
>Gentlemen, if the work of this group would render invalid some existing 
>IDN (never mind if "parked" or "functioning" or at second or eighth 
>level), I think it's in scope to determine a mechanim for 
>support/migration of those.

I think that for most cases, the actually registered domain names
are among those that still will be allowed under any kind of new rules.
The discussion here is just about fringe cases. A particular fringe
case is tests and other registrations made just to prove a point.

A very good example is the now infamous paypal homograph attack.
http://www.p&1072;ypal.com was registered not for inherent interest
in this domain, but just to prove a point, in early 2005.
For good reasons, this registration was quickly removed.

Another example would be a registration including one of the
sequences in
http://www.unicode.org/reports/tr15/#Corrigendum_5_Sequences
These are totally theoretical, yet allowed (and not normalized
away) on a strict reading of stringprep. The only reason I can
immagine that anybody would make such a registration is to
check what exactly happens for such sequences, or to try to
claim that they exist in practice to somehow influence
the update of IDNA in an unproductive way.

It would be a bad idea to predispose the work ahead by such
marginal issues.

As for migration, the world doesn't run out of domain names
soon. So offering somebody a better alternative for what
was probably a bad choice in the first place will help
everybody, and should keep everybody happy.

Regards,     Martin.



#-#-#  Martin J. Du"rst, Assoc. Professor, Aoyama Gakuin University
#-#-#  http://www.sw.it.aoyama.ac.jp       mailto:duerst at it.aoyama.ac.jp