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.
There are both technical issues and non-technical issues. The technical
issues of mapping Unicode to DNS are indeed the IETF's problem. But
assuming we solve that, there's considerably more to deploying IDNs.
For example, what homograph rules apply to what domains? Are the rules
per-TLD or some other granularity? What are the appropriate rules for
GTLDs, since they don't have a native language other than the de-facto
English? If there are new TLDs with translations of existing TLD names.
e.g., business in Arabic and Chinese, are these aliases for .COM or .BIZ,
or are they different? If people have registered ASCII approximations of
names, e.g., letters without diacriticals, do they get first crack at the
correctly spelled IDN with the diacriticals?
Regards,
John Levine, johnl@xxxxxxxx, Primary Perpetrator of "The Internet for Dummies",
Information Superhighwayman wanna-be, http://johnlevine.com, Mayor
"I dropped the toothpaste", said Tom, crestfallenly.
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