Browser IDN display policy: opinions sought

[JFC Morfin]

At 07:44 13/12/2011, Patrik Fältström wrote:
>ICANN only police the TLD, no other levels in the domain name tree.

Uncorrect. ICANN only try to police the minority of NTIA root TLD 
managers who contracted with them. IETF is for everyone who use TCP/IP.

Anyway, all this debate looks like the IETF people being reasonable 
but trying evading responsibility by hiding behind ICANN? Let 
clarify: Vint attempted to transfer responsbility of the 
post-IDNA2008 work to ICANN. However:

- ICANN has not taken the bait.
- Lisa's architectural questions belong to the IETF scope and have to 
be addressed first.
- ICANN, as everyone else, has no capacity to speak on behalf of all 
the Internet Users.

Gervase was correct in soughting opinions. No one has legitimate 
authority nor practical capacity to decide for the whole existing and 
future internet community. The only thing which can be done is for 
some to document what they suggest (IAB), what they think (this 
thread), or what they intend to do or already did.

Pragmatically, since IAB did not wish to provide guidance and 
opinions are divided, what will actually forge the future are those 
who specify, develop, test and deploy. They are authoritative for the 
community of those adhering to their postulates or locked in their 
"+" services. This is traditionally called in IETF jargon a market 
decision. It should traditionnally be made under IETF influence (RFC 
3935) for the Internet to work better. However, this thread shows 
that a RFC 3935bis is first needed to document what "work better" 
means today. This is what browser manufacturers, as many others, try 
to be told, in order to build a "better internet" window in the http 
web application context.

jfc