As someone intimately involved with implementing IDNs in the last few
years, I find much of the debate totally irrelevant to the little
end-user, and I'm afraid IDN has become a field for politicians and
commercial interests. I'd like to see Hong or anybody else provide me some
hard data or research results on how many real people truly feel
disadvantaged by the DNS system as it exists. The fact is that Internet
has not yet reached those people who would feel the disadvantage, i.e.,
those in the third world totally unfamiliar with Latin script. And let me
emphasize that unfamiliarity with Latin alphabet is not the reason why
Internet penetration is low in disadvantaged countries. Of course I'd love
to see DNS replaced some day with a more script-neutral system, but I
haven't observed any immediate pressing need for this at this moment.
Let me relate my personal experience as the head of a ccTLD that has
implemented IDNs: The lack of interest in IDNs after one year is so
overwhelming('underwhelming?') that we decided to offer as incentive a
free one-year ASCII domain to IDN registrants. In the last few months
before this, IDN registration rate had fallen to one-hundredth of ASCII
registration. In our survey of the reasons for the lack on interest, the
lack of IDN.IDN ranked fifth among five proposed reasons. Still of course
I am for IDN.IDN, but let us keep sober about all this.
Siavash
> Confucius said: 'Is it not gentlemanly not to take offense when others
> fail to understand what you mean?'
>
> The non-Latin script users are so gentlemanly that they would not even
> take offense of the message, let along shooting the messengers.
>
> The term "IDN" is actually a paradox. Domain names in the American
> Standard Code for Information Interchange is already
> internationalized--they are being used prevalently around the world.
> Enabling native non-Latin scripts used in the web/email addresses
> should be going to another direction--localization to cater the local
> language users' demand. Then, why do we have a term "internationalized
> domain names"? Say, are domain names in Yiddish scripts so
> internationalized as to be usable by Korean people? Yiddish is still
> for some Jewish communities, and Korean is still for Korean.
>
> All the difficulties are caused by forcing the localized solutions
> into the internationalized context. If it had not been some corporate
> giant(s) that zealously pursued commercial interests by starting
> registration of domain names in non-Latin scripts and thus framed this
> issue into the DNS, all kinds of localized solutions--probably at the
> application level above the DNS--would have developing steadily and
> healthly. Ordinary users won't mind whether there are IDN roots or
> mapping or punycode. They simply want to use their scripts. We should
> remember who had hijacked the development direction and threw out the
> concept of IDNs that must be resolved in the DNS.
>
> If after ages of profound research, those highly respectable experts
> conclude that there is no way to realize the IDNs, then at least users
> may expect some localized though imperfect solution to address their
> need. But on the contrary, the experts insist that IDNs can be done
> and will be done in a way that is different from what the users
> believe happens or should happen. Then, what is the meaning of the
> IDNs if they are useless to the users?
>
> Hong
>
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IPM/IRNIC
P.O.Box 19395-5564, Shahid Bahonar Sq.
Tehran 19548, Iran
Phone: (+98 21) 22 82 80 80; 22 82 80 81, ext 113
Cell: (+98 912)104 2501
Fax: (+98 21) 22 29 57 00
Email: shahshah@xxxxxxxx, shahshah@xxxxxx
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IPM/IRNIC
P.O.Box 19395-5564, Shahid Bahonar Sq.
Tehran 19548, Iran
Phone: (+98 21) 22 82 80 80; 22 82 80 81, ext 113
Cell: (+98 912)104 2501
Fax: (+98 21) 22 29 57 00
Email: shahshah@xxxxxxxx, shahshah@xxxxxx
-----------------------------------------------