Roberto, Speaking as someone that was on the customer service side with a registrar during the introduction of the VeriSign multilingual testbed, I can attest to the problems associated with "rushing forward" to accomodate demand before systems and policy are fully ready -- so I am more concerned about the consequences of rushing forward too quickly than I am about the consequences of necessary delay. Allow me to direct your attention to the Minutes of the Meeting of the board's Executive Committee (30 January 2001) to better illustrate this point: "Although over 800,000 names have been registered in VeriSign's testbed, there has been significant opposition to the manner in which the testbed was deployed. The IETF, in general, has criticized VeriSign for deploying the testbed before the IETF completed a Proposed Standard. Various Asian governments have complained that the introduction was done without the appropriate sensitivity to cultural values. Companies have complained that the introduction was done in a way that facilitated cybersquatting of their names." "One problem that has arisen is the practice of some registrants to register multilingual names outside of the testbed. This has resulted in those registrants being able to register IDNs ahead of the announced schedule, resulting in those who relied on the schedule being blocked from registering those names and prompting significant complaints of unfairness. In addition to this "gold rush" phenomenon, some have complained that this practice has been used for multilingual cybersquatting. These effects have impaired the smooth deployment of VeriSign's multilingual testbed, and threaten in the longer term to disrupt development and deployment of IDN programs generally." Yes, there can be consequences associated with further delay, but by the same token ICANN as technical manager of the DNS has a duty to "get it right". In my view that means waiting for the Standard. regards, Danny --- Roberto Gaetano <roberto@icann.org> wrote:
Danny Younger wrote:
In the IDN world, do we really want to see an advantage given to either IDN gTLDs or to the IDN ccTLDs by having one of these groups launched before the other?
Maybe. But on the other hand, playing the devil's advocate here, by artificially delaying one or the other of the IDN TLD category, aren't we really giving an unfair competitive advantage to the non-IDN TLDs?
And please be aware that I don't want to raise any polemic here, this is a genuine question. I am also a fan of "get a standard first", as you propose in the last paragraph of your message (below), but I am seriously concerned about the consequences of further delay.
Cheers, Roberto
"The IANA is not in the business of deciding what
is and what
is not a country's set of territorial scripts" -- this truly should be a matter for a standards body to determine through its processes. I remain of the view that ICANN, in its role as technical manager of the DNS, should only act when such a list is properly compiled.
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