At 03:29 10/08/2008, Hong Xue wrote:
What Chris said reminds me of the ALAC statement at the ICANN Public Forum: ICANN should encourage the IDN gTLDs be run by the small-scale, non-commercial and language community-base registries. But under the auction model, these applicants will be simply out of the question.
Hong
Dear Hong, We are in a real world. This world has a digital ecosystem, which is the convergence of all its digital resources. The usage of this ecosystem is understood by people, governments, and businesses as the "Information Society". It is internationally supported by seven main bodies: ITU for the underlying telecommunications, ISO for the normative aspects, WSIS/IGF for the datacommunications aspects, UNESCO for the cultural and educational part of emerging metacommmunications, and the commercial aspects that are being dealt with by the WTO. The IntellectualProperty issues are addressed by WIPO. The seventh body is the Internet itself, which RFCs call the "Internet Community", that we call "@larges" the lead users, the WSIS calls "the people", and ICANN calls "the market". This results from the very architectural nature of the Internet (the network of the networks): there is no "Internet Operator". This is something quite new. However, increasingly more global mechanisms are developing in that way, as a concerted effort rather than as a directed or a collective effort. This means that we are in a transition between those who want to control the world (and will never be able to do so) and those who want to help it work in its new ways. This changes simply results from the number of people, education, parity, and the state of the art. They make us transition from a world of 200 countries or so to a world of 6.5 billion partly internationally sovereign people). You are right. This boils down to can ".china" be sold by ICANN to banks that will associate in order to protect ICANN even if the JPA is not renewed? This simply means, who in our digital world is to say what China is: a country or an e-commerce market. The one who can is actually the one who owns the IANA as the referent center of the Internet and the core of the world digital ecosystem. This is why there is a race between: - internationalization with a unilateral IANA which documents all the languages and shall remain the center of the Internet - and multilingualisation with an extended multilateral IANA distributed system documents Internet interoperability and interintelligibility among all nations, cultures, languages, trades, communities, and people. A single Google or billions of interrelated ISO 11179++ e-empowered and real time ontologies. Trillions of dollars, national powers, industrial strategies, and billions of lives are at stake. Until the NTIA spoke up, ICANN believed it possessed IANA forever and could negotiate it with the several entities that are engaged in trying to control it. Now, ICANN has to expedite the process and commit something in favor of its IANA involvement before August 31, 2009. DNSSEC was a possibility and ISOC (.org) is trying to speed up its deployment. IANA's own management and new services that would require ICANN's expertise is another possibility (IANA under XML, and new services signed with TLD Managers, Escrow policy). Obviously, the key one is the Internationalized Internet that has to be played with the main industrial entities through their Unicode consortium (which will necessarily welcome the business IDNccTLD operators for reasons that are plain to you if you are on the WG-IDNABIS or WG-LTRU mailing lists). This is why the real issue is between the Internationalized and Multilingualised Internet. One has to understand the devil's trap. The Internationalized Internet is still devised in a centralized manner (IDNA, LSR, ICANN IDNccTLDs). That architecture will impose an enormous load on the IANA machines and lines; moreover, the way that IDN, langtags, IDNccTLD have been designed, with no specific system having been developed to update billions of users. This is the same as if Host.txt was still supporting the Internet names and we had no DNS. There will be a day (chosen by a few Unicode members in changing a few lines of codes in the ICU language routines used everywhere) when the lingual applications will start (along their own updates) to really interchange with the IANA machines, dumping the huge LSR registry and creating the largest DoS ever. That day, an emergency decision will have to be made: who is going to operate the IANA. There are only two answers: Unicode or UN, meaning in the short term Google or the USA. The bet is that "people" (press, media, "activists", etc.) will "oppose" "non-democratic" US control over the Internet, which would lead to "UN" control through the IGF. I do not think that we should be impressed. Because all of this is based on a centralized root server system, adherence to the langtags, a well working IDNA, a general technical sleepness among @larges around the world, and a lack of early enough warning of ISO, ITU, UNESCO, and Governments. ICANN's root server IP address story, the overdelays in writing the RFC 4646bis (langtags upgrade), the acknowledgment by Vint Cerf (Chair of the WG-IDNABIS) that the IDNA200X that they are working on will not be the ML-DNS that people expect (which would offer in every language the same quality of service as the current DNS in ASCII English), etc. make that the unilateral management of the most multilateral system ever developed is not that easy. However, this does not mean that they will not hope to succeed, in turn creating confusion. As the one you oppose. This is what we have to be prepared to cope with. 1) in helping ICANN decide whether they want to do good, how and when. And to help it as most will be at a relational level. This is the ALAC real job. It is critical for ICANN. 2) in helping devise technical solutions and relational organizations that can help those users who are not protected by their Government and their Language as, for example, the Chinese community is. jfc