Re: [ICANN-EU] IDN or: Are users Unicode-aware?

[Vittorio Bertola <vb@vitaminic.net>]

On Thu, 14 Sep 2000 18:55:53 +0200, you wrote:

>This implies that domain names can't be used globally any more,
>because they can't be typed or read globally (note that phone
>numbers can).  That is, domain names become close to useless as
>globally unique addresses which they, technically, still are.

I don't see a real problem in this. The only caveat is that,
obviously, uniqueness in the domain name space has to be preserved, so
that each couple (1 string, 1 codepage) - or even better, one Unicode
string - identifies uniquely a DNS entry. Then, if someone will want
to choose an URL that most people in the world can't type, it's their
business - they possibly don't care about losing that target, and
that's it. Surely, this goes against all of our traditional ideas
about the Internet uniting the world and so on, but well, world is not
united anyway :)

However, I'd really like, as you point out, to have some mandatory way
to be able to type any URL by using just us-ascii alphanumeric
characters. However, I can't see why it should not simply be one of
the many Web services run by privates. If an easy way to do it through
the DNS can be found, great, but the world could still live without
it. And by the way, the only real way to solve this problem is to have
Unicode become the universal standard for text coding on any computer
system. Shortcuts won't work.

My real concern, on the other hand, is about NSI's move. I fear the
risk of IDNs being implemented as HTML was - when two competing
businesses were trying to introduce incompatible extensions of the
code to gain competitive advantage over the other. I think that ICANN
should react very firmly to any try to implement IDNs out of the
standards, and I hope that its contracts are made so that TLD
delegations can be withdrawn in such a case. But to do this, ICANN
needs power and credibility. So we're back to the ICANN structure
problem.

-- 
.oOo.oOo.oOo.oOo vb.
Vittorio Bertola     <vb@vitaminic.net>    Ph. +39 011 23381220
Vitaminic [The Music Evolution] - Vice President for Technology