Another thoughts on TRANSITIONAL

[Andrew Sullivan]

On Sun, Dec 06, 2009 at 07:51:18AM -0500, Vint Cerf wrote:

> under IDNA2008 rules on a registry by registry basis (I mean registry  
> in its
> most general sense, not just TLD)

The overwhelming majority of DNS operators -- i.e. "registries" -- in
the world are blissfully unaware of the work that goes on at the IETF.
Today, I'd wager that an insiginificant minority of registries (zone
operators) know anything at all about IDNA, never mind that there are
two flavours that are subtly and importantly different.  There are
millions of zones out there -- well over 20 million under .com alone.

The concerns raised by those who are worried about a security problem
here are not going to go away if we just say, "Well, sure, but at the
_top_ level we can co-ordinate something."  If that's our answer, then
those who have raised concerns (who, I must note, are in control of
exactly the clients that will be influential in deployment) will
simply fall back to their previous plan: they'll map these characters
away, and we'll be no better off on these characters than we were
under IDNA2003.

The WG is of course free to conclude that such is a desirable
strategy, but I can't believe we'd be revisiting these questions at
such length if that was the outcome we actually wanted.  We could have
agreed to that some weeks ago.

A


-- 
Andrew Sullivan
ajs at shinkuro.com
Shinkuro, Inc.