Annex 2. Is IDNA an ML-DNS to be?

From IUCG - Internet Users Contributing Group

These mails belong to one of the first exchanges of the WG/IDNABIS.

At 03:29 17/05/2008, JFC Morfin wrote:

Dear Vint,

As I explained it, prior to sending this mail, I circulated its draft to many people round the world and took their remarks into consideration, specially @large members who like those of france@large and Multilinc translate "@large" as "an Internet co-owner", and MAAYA Members.

The IDNA issue is a key priority for the continuation of the IETF technology as the network technology of the world digital ecosystem (WDE). If the IETF cannot match the world's expectations in that area it must say so now, so others can consider alternative solutions before we see different uncoordinated local solutions developed and deployed.

>At 22:37 09/05/2008, Kenneth Whistler wrote: What matters, I think, is what contemporary communities *are* using or might reasonably be inferred to want to use if available, for domain names.

Maybe, what really matters are:

(1) the political world consensus for a multilingual Internet for a people centered multilingual society of information,

(2) the universal resentment at being told what one is supposed to want. People accept being told by others as to what they can only do, if they understand exactly why.

The world expects a Multilingual DNS that works for every language and every script the way the DNS works for English and ASCII. Let us call this the ML-DNS specification. It is very simple, terse, and clear.

Question (A): does this IETF WG-IDNABIS seek to document an IDNA based ML-DNS in order to be ready for testing by Dec. 2008 (Y/N)?

Question (B): If A is "N", what are the clearly defined and committed detailed specifications of the Nov. 2008 IETF deliverable?

Among the points to be clarified in these specifications are:

1. - will it be mainly focussed towards Mobiles, Browsers, Applications, or the three of them?
2. - will it be phishing proof at every DN level?
3. - which scripts or charset and languages will be supported? or will it be transparent to scripts choices?
4. - will it be IDN2003 compatible?
5. - will it strive to be future ML-DNS interoperable?
6. - why was the IDNA option chosen as the best way to support ML-DNS vs. other possibilities?
7. - will Microsoft, Google, and Firefox fully and identically support it? Will they also permit the support of any other ML-DNS proposition?
8. - will it support easily additional symbols such as logos?
9. - will it stay ISO 3166 conformant?

Thank you for your committed answer.

At 04:17 18/05/2008, Vint Cerf wrote:

Jefsey,

you forget perhaps that the internet is based on voluntary adoption of standards. IETF does not and cannot enforce; and ICANN has limited means to do so through SOME contracts with SOME parties but not at all levels of DNS nor resellers nor some other operators.

so we just have to write the best technical specifications we can and make them available.

vint

At 01:47 19/05/2008, JFC Morfin wrote:

Dear Vint and all,

It seems that we are all 100% in agreement, except for perhaps James Seng who wants to read things that no one ever wrote. I apologise for coming back to this. I hope that it will finally be the last time.

At 01:04 18/05/2008, Vint Cerf wrote: Let me try to be very clear.

I do not think that we should conflate the IDNA work as chartered with the broader question of ML-DNS as it is becoming apparent that ML-DNS (what ever might be meant by that) does not seem to fit into the present charter.

This is exactly what we wanted to see clearly spelled out. Because, some of us - per my suggestion - thought from reading the Charter and John Klensin's documents that a succesful IDNA could be targeted as a good ML-DNS and that we did not want to disrupt its respective process.

IDNA-bis is intended to refine the basic IDNA mechanisms based on experience to date with the earlier IDNA2003 formulation. IDNA-bis is not chartered, e.g., to invent new classes of domain names.

We are in full agreement. And no one ever suggested this. Our two year ICP-3 community test bed (dot-root) plus our three years of exploration on semantic national protection (AFRAC) and a parallel two years on a multilinguistics investigation have shown us that the ML-DNS does not need to use classes (as John Klensin suggested once). This could help, as would also a built-in presentation layer, but it is not necessary because classes are not unlimited.

It seems to me that we are on a productive vector to finalize the four documents with which the working group began.

Absolutely. And we fully agree with this. James' misunderstanding is, however, very positive as it enables this to be made absolutely clear. We fully support the WG-IDNABIS for what it is and certainly we want to contribute to its success as a good, adequate, compact, clear document set. Either it is good enough to satisfy most of our needs, or it will be easier to encapsulate within any ML-DNS strategy (whatever it may turn out to be). We do not have any solution as of yet. We only have needs currently.

I have not heard any argument (that I was able to understand) that rejected the essential framework of IDNAbis. I AM hearing that some participants would like to consider alternatives to what we seem to be calling IDNA2008 or IDNA200X now. I am not hearing any kind of consensus that we should abandon IDNA2008; rather, I am hearing a desire to finalize these documents. Much of the discussion surrounds the means by which sets of Unicoded characters are either accepted as PVALID or rejected as unacceptable for use in domain names.

Full agreement.

After I explained to them the reasons for James' misunderstanding (he explains very well in his own mail) Louis, other French lurkers, and I believe that proposing to abandon/discuss IDNA2008 would be highly disruptive. Our worry, due to other past confusions and to the possible economic/architectural possible impact, was that our own possible investigation concerning an ML-DNS would not be confused as an alternative but as a more complete solution in a continuity that is totally out of the scope of the WG-IDNABIS.

I think that this mail of yours fully clarifies this for everyone.

1. IDNAbis must be a sucess.
2. It is not intended to be an ML-DNS, so working separately in parallel to the preparation of a possible ML-DNS BOF is encouraged.
3. There is no reason as to why ML-DNS should be discussed any further here. Answering Vint's suggestion, I have created an ML-DNS exploratory mailing list to that end.

I would urge the participants in the IDNAbis Working Group to focus on refining and finalizing the four documents that have been submitted as the basis for the Working Group effort.

We obiously fully concur.

1. We will continue to document the http://wikidna.org with information on/for the IDNA development, deployment and support. _Everyone_ is welcome to come and give a hand.
2. The strategy of this site should be to support complete compatibility at the linguistic IDN level between IDNA and ML-DNS.

At 01:27 18/05/2008, James Seng wrote:Oh I understand the questions fine. And the subtle implication of the lack of usefulness of this WG.

This may be your opinion. However, it is not ours.

But I dont see a need to have the discussion since ML-DNS and questions are clearly out of scope. As Vint indicated, you or anyone is feel to pursue another working group or mailing list for it.

There was not any reason to do it, if we did not need to. Now, you clarified that there was a technical need, and Vint said that we were not disruptive at having a try (we feared your misunderstanding).

This is precisely what we will do, as per the Internet standard process. Exploring through temptative Drafts, and aiming at a BOF.

We will also consider as to how to prepare an adequate legal IDNA acceptance by registrants and registry managers, because we are registrants and registry managers and we need to be fully interoperable with the best IDNA, which we want to help coproduce in this WG.

I also didnt miss the suggestions that some groups may break off from IDNA without ML-DNS (whatever that is) and with reference to Olympic suggesting that Jefsey is somehow speaking on the behalf of the Chinese, however cleverly crafted that it imply he might also not be.

???
I made it clear that I am speaking on behalf of some French and francophone @large and @large international community informed members, defining them as "Internet lead users that consider themselves as Internet co-owners".

I have spend plenty of time recently in China as well as catching up with old friends from CNNIC. But there are CNNIC folks on this list and I am pretty sure they can speak for themselves if they have any objections without someone claiming to represent "@large" or myself even to speak for them.

I thank you for clearly spelling out your belief that I am pretending to speak on behalf of CNNIC.

This clearly shows the exact origin of your misuderstanding: I am not speaking on behalf of CNNIC. Moreover, I am not pretending to speak on behalf of CNNIC, and I do not see what CNNIC has to do with this at all. I do not see why I could be interested in speaking on behalf of the CNNIC??? They already have an IDNA based solution that, therefore, is not an ML-DNS solution (according to you who is the expert).

I also fail to see what objection we could have. We ask a question?

At 04:17 18/05/2008, Vint Cerf wrote:

Jefsey,you forget p'erhaps that the internet is based on voluntary adoption of standards. IETF does not and cannot enforce; and ICANN has limited means to do so through SOME contracts with SOME parties but not at all levels of DNS nor resellers nor some other operators. so we just have to write the best technical specifications we can and make them available.

I did not forget. I am just pragmatic and I have to convince people that are not familiar with the IETF that this the way it works. I thank you for spelling it out: they certainly felt relieved. James Seng's reaction has shown that only asking "if IDNA should or should not be considered as an ML-DNS solution" was a sensible conflicting issue for some. This is what had to be clarified first, both at this WG and among our own @larges.

No one wants confusion or conflict. As Louis explained it, @large people are not really happy about the response that IDNA cannot be considered as an ML-DNS and that they must have a try at it. Furthermore, they did not want to be confused with opponents who they consider as their back-up solution, in which they certainly want to contribute if they can.

I hope this definitely clarifies the issue.