prohibiting previously mapped and unmapped characters

Greg Aaron gaaron at afilias.info
Thu Nov 30 21:43:50 CET 2006


Dear Harald:

You said: "No sane person would spend the effort to put content on the
Internet that could *only* be reached by IDNs."

Actually, I know there are very sane people in India planning to use IDNs
without reliance on LDH domains -- including the Minister of Communications.
Such use is sometimes a matter of regional or national pride.  And some
people don't care about LDH names when they have what they think is a better
alternative.  IDNs are all about providing alternatives.

People may use their domains differently than you do, and differently than
you think they will, and for reasons that may be foreign to you.  I simply
note that due care should be taken when making assumptions about behavior.
People's choices may not always be wise, or adept.  But it's their choice,
and choice within boundaries is one of the great things about the Internet.

You do not need to "regard the registry/registrar/registrant relationship as
the most important part of the Internet" in order to see my point.  The
point is that if you make a class of existing domain names
backwards-incompatible, you're affecting their registrants and users, and
how many of them there are is very relevant and should not be guessed at.

I'll submit again: if one is trying to determine how many potentially
backwards-incompatible names may be out there, certain approaches are more
accurate and more objective.  Considering only IDNs that resolve to Web
sites leaves out a significant percentage of the IDNs in existence, and
relies on some social assumptions.  I'm glad that you think an examination
of the published tables at IANA is a good idea.

All best,
--Greg


-----Original Message-----
From: Harald Alvestrand [mailto:harald at alvestrand.no]
Sent: Wednesday, November 29, 2006 4:52 PM
To: Greg Aaron; Erik van der Poel; idna-update at alvestrand.no
Subject: RE: prohibiting previously mapped and unmapped characters




--On 29. november 2006 16:19 -0500 Greg Aaron <gaaron at afilias.info> wrote:

>
> Quantifying the scope of the issue is a good idea.  However, the number of
> live IDN Web sites is not the most pertinent metric, and it will not tell
> you which characters are never used.  More important is how many (and
> which) IDNs have been registered and are currently in domain name
> registries.

I do not agree.

In my opinion, current use of IDNs is likely to be mostly use of CNAMEs to
point to websites that are also reachable by ASCII names - because no sane
person would spend the effort to put content on the Internet that could
*only* be reached by IDNs.

The harm to the Internet in making all those IDNs go stale would not be
significant.
The harm to the Internet in making all the IDNs that aren't used yet go
stale would be smaller.

> A significant percentage of domain names do not resolve.  In the various
> gTLDs, that percentage is 24% and up.  An even higher percentage of IDNs
> do not resolve, because IDNs are still catching on, and because Internet
> Explorer has not supported IDNs until very recently.  And even if a domain
> does not resolve, the registrant can activate it at any time.
>
> Also, the amount or type of content on a resolving domain is irrelevant.
> All domain names are equal in that they have been paid for, they may be
> used at the registrant's pleasure, and service has been promised by the
> registry and registrar during that domain's registered lifetime.  (To use
> an example from another industry with numerical identifiers: the phone
> company will not take away your phone number just because you haven't
> called anyone recently.)

I can see that if I regard the registry/registrar/registrant relationship
as the most important part of the Internet. I don't.

And anyone who has lived through a change of numbering plan will fall over
laughing at the idea that "the phone company will not take away your phone
number".

> Here is another way to approach the problem.  The number of published IDN
> tables is finite  < http://www.iana.org/assignments/idn/registered.htm >.
> Which collide with the possible areas of backwards-incompatability?

That's a good idea in any case.





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