What should I do?

Xavier Legoff xlegoff at gmail.com
Fri Apr 17 18:50:08 CEST 2009


Dear Mr. Chair,
Dear Mrs. Area Director,

I posed one question: was I or was I not to address the points that I could
consider as pertinent the offensive posts written by Mr. Everson, and now
also by Mr. Seng. You have not answered that question, but you do list such
out in your own way. I will address them in the text shown below. I refer
myself to the understanding of the IETF as published by ISOC (we reproduce
the relevant parts in Annex). It is indeed, more realistic and accurate than
the pure voluntary basis ideal.


2009/4/16 Vint Cerf <vint at google.com>:

*> Whatever may be motivating you and your colleagues to post on the IDNABIS
working group list,*

The IETF has strong participation from the computing, networking, and
telecommunications industries, from companies large and small, and is
responsible for developing the Internet’s technical foundations through its
open global forum. It is an ISOC affiliate, which is largely supported by
its operation of the Public Interest Registry that operates .ORG. In
addition, it solicits and receives support from sponsors, including your
large company, our small companies, and ISOC sustaining members such as JFC
Morfin and some of my other “colleagues” in order to help pay for the cost
of operating IETF. IETF is not a profitable activity. It is, therefore, a
cost center for every one of us.

This means that we have the same motivation and legitimacy as you.
Furthermore, the IETF has found that its process works best when it is
focused around people, rather than around organizations, companies,
governments, or interest groups.

Being supported or not by the france at large organization that was created in
2000, we are independent lead users in our own trades, in turn paying for
our own time when others are paid for it.

It is in this way that we have the independence, competence, and practical
capacity to achieve our common goal, which is to make the Internet work
better for us and our relations. We prefer this to be achieved through the
IETF. This is because we understand that the IETF shares our belief that the
existence of a better Internet, and its influence on economics,
communication, and education, may help us to build a better human society
and lead us all out of the current economic crisis, which partly results
from the difference of capital influence within large organizations such as
yours, and smaller ones like ours.

This is the reason as to why we want to make sure that the IETF produces
high quality, relevant technical and engineering documents, because they
will influence the way people design, use, and manage the Internet in such a
way as to make the Internet to be neutral towards everyone interests.
Including those of your company, those of our business, and those of usage.

Such neutrality means no discrimination in design, use, and management of
the Internet on the basis of race, color, gender, disability, language,
religion, political or other opinion, national or social origin, property,
birth, or other status. (cf. ISOC)


 > it is my frank assessment that continued attempts to argue that the
working group

As users, we observe four IDNA philosophies in this WG:

a. ours. It seeks stability to support open innovation. As such it is
minimalist and seeks a strict and coherent protection of the DNS and RFC
1958 principles.


b. a position that in some aspects is rather near but that also wants to
support IDNA2003.

c. a position that tries to conciliate the various needs gathered on what we
consider a random basis.

d. a position that demands a strict and unique internationalization scheme.

We are not very interested in “b” because no francophone TLD supports
IDNA2003. We strictly oppose "d"  as obsolete and unnecessarily
constraining.


 > is off charter

The WG will stop work and recommend that a new charter be generated if it
concludes that any of the following are necessary to meet its goals:

(iii) A change to the basic approach taken in the design team documents
(Namely: [] elimination of character mapping in the protocol)

We completely oppose mapping at the protocol level (including all of what
actually can be equaled to mapping to nil).


>or is assuming responsibility that you think an IETF working group should
not have

We do not say that it should not have it. We say it has no competence or
legitimacy thereof.

- RFC 3935: * Technical competence* - the issues on which the IETF produces
its documents are issues where the IETF has the competence that is needed to
speak to them, and that the IETF is willing to listen to technically
competent input from any source.

This WG did not even understand the term “semiotics”, or considered it as
off topic. Nothing prevents ISOC from hiring some external experts, but this
is not the case yet. When JFC stated that this WG had no linguist, you
replied that that was something unfair to say because we had Mark Davis who
knows linguists.

- RFC 3935: * Protocol ownership* - when the IETF takes ownership of a
protocol or function, it accepts *responsibility* for all the aspects of the
protocol, even though some aspects may rarely or never be seen on the
Internet. Conversely, when the IETF is not responsible for a protocol or
function, it does not attempt to exert control over it, even though it may
at times touch or affect the Internet.

Languages are mind to mind protocols. Characters and phonemes are their
basic information unit. The equivalent of the bit as seen in communications
theory (0 1, red/green, short/long). Discussing characters, as this WG does,
should involve grammarians. Disallowing a character has the same impact,
where this character should be used, as disallowing “1” in an Internet
protocol bits.

If the IETF enters into this field, it should additionally assume the
world's language maintenance. It should, furthermore, be included in the
Charter.

*NB*. Our reading of Unicode's contribution is as follows. The WG wants to
use it to fix our missing Internet presentation layer problem. It was not
designed for that. Therefore, they tried hard to nearly make it just
*once *(this
is internationalization) but did not do so with all the *multiple flexible
diversity* as demanded by a transition towards multilingualization.

NB. Our reading of the strategic situation can be found in your announced
"overwhelming consensus" in favor of this WG disallowing the Arabic TATWEEL
character at protocol level and the critics we receive because it is not
even French spelling.

* we did not observe that consensus
* engineers have no capacity to change spelling in any language
* disallowing at protocol level is mapping to nil at protocol level and
requires a Charter change
* most of all, we feel that everyone following this debate understands that
it is a "Lorenz butterfly" and it is likely that TATWEEL may eventually end
as a strom which will break the continuity of the Internet neutrality. This
is something we do not want to be responsible for.

>or that the working group should be pursuing Jefsey Morfin's Multilingual
DNS ideas

There are no “Jefsey Morfin's Multilingual DNS ideas”. “Multilingual DNS”
does not make sense in most of the documented understandings of the “DNS”
ambivalent term.

In ML-DNS (http://ml-dns.org) "ML" stand <http://ml-dns.org/>s for
<http://ml-dns.org/>*multi-ledger* (server associated registries on a
lingual or application basis), mark-up language for domain names, and
multilateral DNS usage in a distributed environment.

JFC has already repeated several times that any ML-DNS architecture should
use IDNA2008 as a default. You fired him for trying to make sure that this
would remain possible...


 > are counterproductive not only for you and your colleagues but for the
progress of this working group.

This could be true if we were off topic. We are clearly, however, not off
topic. Alternatively, we certainly do accept the fact that we are off of *
your* proposed solution to the considered topic.

Since we represent a non-negligible number of contributors and made it
rather clear that we support most of what the “c” philosophy proposes (Pete
Resnik), led us to believe that we had reached a near consensus that you
were leaning towards accepting until your overt opposition towards us for
being counterproductive, along with Mark Davis' post .


*> Continued postings arguing for "multi-lingual DNS" or changes to the DNS
architecture are simply not in the mandate of this working group*.

We strongly oppose the weakening of the DNS by some propositions of this
group and the confusion that IDNA2008 might introduce. We fully trust Andrew
Sullivan and strictly support every position of this DNS related matter.

We certainly have propositions to further protect the DNS and promote a
robust and innovative use of domain names (we are users) towards a true A2A
(application to application) presentation layer. These propositions do NOT
fall under the area of this working group. To imply that they do, is really
rather confusing.


>> At the moment, we just need to define the mapping function(s) that we
agreed upon at the last face/face meeting and confirmed again on the mailing
list.

We never confirmed that. We strictly oppose all character mapping at the
protocol level.

This is because we think it is:

* a threat to the Internet's stability

* a layer violation

* a real embarrassment for further enhanced solutions.

We have our own modeling answering this difficulty and will publish it.
However, we confirm in this all of the positions of others, our own
experimentations, planned development, and service strategy in the
sociolinguistic TLD area.


> Continued postings that divert from this goal will lead to cancellation of
working group list posting privileges.

We understand Mark Davis' interest and why you may want to support it. If it
is your intended goal to impose a single mapping, and at the protocol level
(instead of mapping recommendations at the application level).

If this is the case, we will certainly continue to introduce our opposition.
As individuals we are small, but our number is large and we are utterly
determined to protect our interests.

Sorry.

Xavier Legoff



 > On 4/15/09, Xavier Legoff <xlegoff at gmail.com> wrote:
>>
>> Dear Mr. Cerf,
>> I am used to academic eccentricity. I also understand that being
>> confronted by Mr. Everson is a sophomore ritual.
>>
>> In our statement, we tried to limit ourselves to what directly belongs
>> or affects the very well defined area of this WG. i.e. the end to end
>> support of Unicode through TCP/IP languaging.
>>
>> Mr. Everson's troll engages a little further. I do not wish this WG to
>> waste any time. However, if you feel that some of these points need to be
>> discussed in more detail, please let us know.
>>
>> We tried to not look pedantic to people who know their own trade. We
>> are just worried when they consider taking "small" non-concerted
>> decisions without concerting with other trades where the impact can be
>> gigantic.
>>
>> Sincerely,
>>
>> Xavier Legoff


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 2009/4/16 Vint Cerf <vint at google.com>

> M. Legoff,
>
> Whatever may be motivating you and your colleagues to post on the IDNABIS
> working group list, it is my frank assessment that continued attempts to
> argue that the working group is off charter or is assuming responsibility
> that you think an IETF working group should not have or that the working
> group should be pursuing Jefsey Morfin's Multilingual DNS ideas are
> counterproductive not only for you and your colleagues but for the progress
> of this working group.
>
> Continued postings arguing for "multi-lingual DNS" or changes to the DNS
> architecture are simply not in the mandate of this working group.
>
> At the moment, we just need to define the mapping function(s) we agreed
> upon at the last face/face meeting and confirmed again on the mailing list.
> Continued postings that divert from this goal will lead to cancellation of
> working group list posting privileges.
>
> vint cerf
>
>
>
> On 4/15/09, Xavier Legoff <xlegoff at gmail.com> wrote:
>>
>> Dear Mr. Cerf,
>> I am used to accademic excentricity. I also understand that being
>> confronted to Mr. Everson is a sophomore ritual.
>>
>> In our statement we tried to limit ourselves to what directly belongs
>> or affects the very well defined area of this WG. i.e. the end to end
>> support of Unicode through TCP/IP languaging.
>>
>> Mr. Everson's troll engages a little further. I do not wish this WG to
>> waste time. But if you feel that some of these points need to be
>> discussed more in detail, please let us know.
>>
>> We tried not to look pedantic to people who know their own trade. We
>> are just worried when they consider taking "small" non concerted
>> decisions without concerting with other trades where the impact can be
>> gigantic.
>>
>> Sincerely.
>>
>>
>> Xavier Legoff
>>
>
>
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