Vint in International Herald Tribune on IDNs
30 October 2006 | Published in DNS, ICANN | 1 Comment
According to this article in IHT , those who want deployment of IDNs now are “political gambits”. Cerf said that the technical side is not yet ready and thus the deployment of IDNs should be done very carefully.
I agree to the technical aspects. However, the next question is of course: “when will it be ready for deployment ?”. Can the ICANN community commit to a deadline it will meet ? If not, ICANN should not blame those “political gambits” who wish to go forward because they just cannot afford to wait anymore.
There is a bad habit in the ICANN community that it should set the agenda and the rest of the world should just follow. Trouble is of course that the “rest of the world” represents several billion people, most of them ignoring the very existence of ICANN and even more its legitimity to set the world agenda. ICANN sounds more and more like Major Tom in David Bowie’s Space Oddity: “Ground Control to Major Tom, your circuit’s dead, there’s something wrong. Can you hear me Major Tom ?”
This post has also been featured on CircleID , where most of the discussion will take place, I guess
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31 October 2006 at 0:42 (#)
patrick,
The critical path at this point is the IETF‘s work on re-examining how to specify which characters to include from the large UNICODE set for use with IDNs. There are RFCs (4690) and several Internet Drafts on the subject. ICANN is already doing IDN testing in a laboratory copy of the root zone file and live tests could be underway by the end of the year or sooner. we also need to establish the rules for creating new TLDs, including those with IDNs. That work is under way in the GNSO.
Once confidence can be established in the IDN character inclusion rules, then the pacing item will be evaluation of proposals for new TLDs.