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

[Jeff Williams <jwkckid1@ix.netcom.com>]

Vittorio and all,

  Yes I agree as do our members.  ICANN is s circular problem
that needs to be cut and straightened out to a straight line.  However
the ICANN board either doesn't want this for occur, or is too
ignorant to see the forest for all of the trees...

Vittorio Bertola wrote:

> 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 delegations can be withdrawn in such a case.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

Regards,

--
Jeffrey A. Williams
Spokesman INEGroup (Over 112k members strong!)
CEO/DIR. Internet Network Eng/SR. Java/CORBA Development Eng.
Information Network Eng. Group. INEG. INC.
E-Mail jwkckid1@ix.netcom.com
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