Changing the values of domain names and the need for mapping

[Paul Hoffman]

At 4:00 PM -0500 2/16/09, Vint Cerf wrote:
>As of this writing, it is my understanding that the Esszet and
>Final Sigma characters are to be treated as protocol-valid

If that truly is the WG consensus, then we have gone against the charter of the WG. Looking over the archives of December, I cannot find where in the consensus calls that decision was clearly made, so I might be wrong about it being WG consensus. We are saying that domain names that currently have one bits-on-the-wire value  will change to a different bits-on-the-wire value after IDNA2008 is finished.

> and
>that registries (in the most general sense of the word) are
>prepared to deal with the side-effects of prior registrations
>following the IDNA2003 guidelines.

This seems like an overstatement. For example, VeriSign has many domain names registered in .com that are encodings of strings that use Esszet. To the best of my knowledge, no one from VeriSign has said on this list or in any other forum that VeriSign is prepared to deal with the very real effects (not "side-effects") of current registrations under the IDNA2003 protocol (not "guidelines"). The same is true for PIR and .org. Further, the one registry that has said it can deal with the effects of the Esszet change has not definitively said how they will do so.

I do not see how such changes, supported by so little of the affected community, can be considered acceptable within the stability wording of the WG charter.