tables document [Re: IDNA comments]

JFC Morfin jefsey at jefsey.com
Wed Jul 16 01:43:19 CEST 2008


Dear John,
I do not know if reducing the number of notions (yet not of terms) 
available to discuss an issue through a non-documented fuzzy 
vocabulary may help simplifying a documentation, because this not my 
culture. For a proper analysis and a further deployment, I need to be 
able to use the words for what they mean. This means that I am not 
good at trying to uncover what terms do not mean from their context 
under work. I am afraid I am not alone in such a case.

As far as I am concerned, I relate with a Registry Manager (ISO 
11179) what is humanly authoritative, and with a Zone what is 
protocol authoritative - within the Registry Manager eventual 
decision framework, as being the trustee of his Internet community 
(RFC 1591). If there is another vocabulary to express this, I will be 
glad to learn and to us it.

This being said, IMHO you correctly document the crux of the issue: 
that IDNA introduces a fundamental change from the ASCII DNS 
authority. This is what I read as its lack of support by ccTLD Managers.

>At 17:05 15/07/2008, John C Klensin wrote:
>In some sense, IDNA can be seen as a way to remove the external, 
>non-DNS-protocol, constraints that prevented the use of non-ASCII 
>strings that were intended to be interpreted as parts of domain names.

This makes IDNA 2008 the final authority (actually the final 
authority you disregard is a copyright you do not know yet ("Each 
version of the Unicode Standard has further specifications of rights 
and restrictions of use"). Not the Registry Manager technically 
anymore. The same as the ICANN strategy tends to remove his political 
control. All this is about by-passing national/cultural 
sovereignties. You may want that, but it sales poorly to those 
wanting to protect them.

I read this as in contradiction with the WSIS documents, agreement, 
and GAC positions. This is where the IDNA 2008 must be more worked 
on. I expect this to be more clearly visible and more easily 
addressed in the compact and mostly technical approach. This is why I 
was glad of you alternative-00.txt draft which should also have made 
it more visible to everyone.

>We have also always understood how a zone administrator at level
>N of the DNS can impose its will about external constraints on
>zone administrators at level N+1 and below.  It simply makes
>registration conditional on obeying whatever rules it lays out
>and declines to create the delegation (or withdraws it) if those
>rules are not agreed to or followed.   In practice, there are
>often a lot of problems with that theory, but they are not
>protocol problems, or problems for this WG or the IETF more
>generally.

This sounds like a final say : "IETF is not interested in the user 
reality". Theoretic network centric ("ICANN defeined market centric" 
said Twomey in Paris), not people centric. Is that also the proper 
way to read you?

>None of those external constraints, or how they are defined and
>administered, are part of the agenda of this WG.  As soon as you
>start talking about ccTLDs as compared to other types of TLDs or
>domains much lower in the tree, or about how policies are
>propagated, you are off-topic or simply not understanding what
>is going on here at best.

This seems to be a perfect illustration of the GAC VP question to ICANN.

ICANN says the IETF DNS and ICANN approaches worked well during the 
last ten years and therefore they want to consolidate it. What proves 
that this approach will work in a non-ASCII environment? ( more over 
if we miss the technical terms to properly describe the issues at 
stake, while we have them in other arenas or/and languages and tend 
to think issues are more complex [not complicated] than discussed in 
here so far).

For the time being we wait for a response from the IESG, IAB and our 
WG Chairs and our AD: is the technical side of that GAC fundamental 
question, @larges fully share, to be addressed within the IETF or at 
the IGF, and how to best protect interoperability?

>As I have said many times before, I'm in favor of 
>voluntary-compliance "best practices" recommendations that describe 
>what ideas are good, what are bad, why, and how to tell the 
>difference.  But none of those are part of this WG's charter either.

Unfortunately, the real world is not about "voluntary-compliance". A 
system which has no built-in security against hackers, has no 
possibility to be described and protected by laws, does not consider 
international trade agreements, can certainly be of academic high 
value and interest like studies/statistics on spam and phishing are, 
but has it a field value and interest?. Right now the charter of this 
WG calls for something that works, at least for ASCII users having to 
interface multilingual usages and hackers.

I feel that there are three prerequistes to any Charter compliant work:
- a clear modelisation of IDNA within the global DNS framework (we 
work on that but are forbiden to discuss it in here)
- a multilingual glossary of the notions being used in English, 
completed by the description of the concepts not being used in IETF 
English. We have started that project for it to develop this year.
- a clear and consensual frame (or backbone) of the technical 
document advocated by Paul.

At the end of the day, we are a number of people trying to understand 
what this WG-IDNABIS is about. This seems to be a prerequisite if 
IETF wants (1) us to help (2) us and a portion of the world to 
understand what you will deliver.

Sorry to be so dumb stupid. But we are those you write RFCs for (or 
if we are not, thank you to let us know).
Best regards,
jfc



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