North American Network Operators Group

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Re: Non-English Domain Names Likely Delayed

  • From: Brad Knowles
  • Date: Mon Jul 18 17:08:10 2005

At 5:03 PM +0200 2005-07-18, Iljitsch van Beijnum wrote:

     The registry customers don't pay the bills of ICANN and the
 governments who maintain the ccTLDs.
 Governments? You have some strange ideas about ccTLDs.
Okay, fine -- government-authorized organizations, then. Such as SIDN for .nl, DNS.be for .be, etc.... Like Verisign, they may well have to get their contracts renewed with the government. Like Verisign, the people who pay the bills are not the end-user consumers of e-mail addresses and web browsers, and many of the bill-payers are likely to be the sort of people who would want to encourage confusion.

 That's why it's good that browser vendors are keeping an eye on this.
We definitely don't want the registries being the watchers in this case, but I also don't think we want to have a mish-mash hodge-podge of twelve zillion different solutions, each of which is being hard-coded into various different applications. This is an area where we need to have some standards that can be broadly applied to all Internet and Internet-enabled applications, including web browsers.

You wouldn't want Ford setting standards for roads, even if they could create an agreement with GM. And you don't want each country setting their own universal standards, either. That way lies madness.

 Let the lawyers rule the world? Yeah right, that will help.
Excuse me? How on God's Bloody Green Earth did you pull that out of your @$$?

 When the "governance" types get it right, sure, set up all the browsers
 to take their cue. In the mean time, let's do what works today.
Fine, so we get different implementations in every single browser and MUA and every other Internet-enabled program. You get what you want.

 Ultimately, the user should be in control (like I am with my named.root
 file) but the vendors should set good defaults to help the users who
 can't do this themselves.
You're a customer of an ISP. You know nothing about how to run your own nameserver. Just how exactly do you expect to have control over your own named.root?

If you're not a programmer with direct commit access to Mozilla and Opera, just how exactly do you expect to have any control over this process?


Your personal example doesn't count here. What counts is what the average user can do/is reasonably capable of.

--
Brad Knowles, <[email protected]>

"Those who would give up essential Liberty, to purchase a little
temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety."

-- Benjamin Franklin (1706-1790), reply of the Pennsylvania
Assembly to the Governor, November 11, 1755

SAGE member since 1995. See <http://www.sage.org/> for more info.