[ALAC] [IDN-WG] [APAC-Discuss] The Problem of IDNs

[Evan Leibovitch]

On 20 May 2014 22:28, Rinalia Abdul Rahim <rinalia.abdulrahim at 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