John Levine wrote:
ICANN has not to date dealt very effectively with these issues, but they are real issues that will have a great effect on people who use the DNS every day, and they're not technical issues, since all of the alternatives are equally feasible technically.
At its base, IDN is a technical matter. That is the realm of the IETF, not ICANN. ICANN can deploy and administer solutions developed in the IETF, but it cannot create them. That's not its job and it's not its skillset.
IDN has undergone protracted IETF work, with problematic results. Unfortunately, moving from trivial net-ASCII to something that supports the global range of characters, such as Unicode, has been received sustained effort for 10-15 years on the Internet, with modest results
So before we assert that one organization, or another, has not dealt effectively with these issues, we need to acknowledge that these issues have proved remarkably difficult for *anyone* to deal with effectively, at the scale and complexity of the Internet.
This is not to suggest that efforts cease, but merely that we accept the extensive, diligent effort by bright people has yet to succeed in converting the net to solutions of "these issues".
That means that it will be more productive to focus on understanding and dealing with the technical, administrative, operations and human factors difficulties in solving the problems, than in declaring any particular organization deficient.
d/ -- Dave Crocker Brandenburg InternetWorking bbiw.net _______________________________________________ Ietf@xxxxxxxx https://www1.ietf.org/mailman/listinfo/ietf