On 20 May 2014 22:28, Rinalia Abdul Rahim <rinalia.abdulrahim@gmail.com>wrote: 3. ICANN-staff organized session on the topic of Universal Acceptance -
I expect a session will be held in London. Do attend that session as well to provide input to ICANN from the end user's perspective.
Suffice it to say that my PoV on UA is very, very different from Van Gelder's. The main problem identified by this topic is one of the domain industry's own making and should not be surprising to anyone who has been following the gTLD expansion. Indeed, it is telling that the push for universal acceptance is coming from the supply-side of the DNS (the domain industry) and not the demand side (non-speculative domain buyers and end users). Watching the domain industry trying to make its problem to be everyone else's problem is entertaining while it is sad. This is but the latest ICANN remedial gTLD effort, handled as adeptly as its other remedial efforts (such as Public Interest Commitments and the Applicant Support program, meaning not adeptly at all). Maybe ICANN will be more aggressive in this effort, for -- unlike the failures of PICs and Applicant Support -- failure in UA will directly result in reduced revenue. But I simply can't see greater desperation causing a magically elevated level of competence that hasn't existed before. As for UA in IDNs, the assertion by Van Gelder that the use of eight-bit characters for domain names is a massive innovation is preposterous. Approval of non-Latin scripts by the ICANN bureaucracy, almost two decades after the release of Unicode 2.0, is hardly a source of invention. The real innovation in helping users find Internet information is happening elsewhere, like at Google, Samsung, Facebook, Bitly and Baidu. Of course, as I have said in the past, if this problem persists long enough to result in the failure of most new gTLDs, the rest of the Internet -- and the global population -- simply won't care. The DNS is just one way to get where one wants to go on the Net. The world has already worked around the problem of finding Internet destinations already caused by ICANN policy, which makes fixing UA non-critical to the rest of us. I will do my best to attend the ICANN session on UA, at least for the entertainment value. - Evan