Re: [Fwd: Re: [alac] FW: Review and Recommendations for Internationalized Domain Names (IDNs)]
I'm in the middle of something so cannot spend much time on our interesting discussions. The "hard data" may be Verisign's registration statistics of Chinese-character domain names. The People who are in the second-largest Internet community in the world and using the non-alphabet characters are feeling the constraints of the Latin-script DNS every day. They are keenly want to use their native scripts. Therefore, Verisign indulges in find such a big market and eventually stirred up the reactions from other stakeholders. I'm not opposing IDNs (including IDN.IDN), but what I'm intend to emphasize is that the users' demand for non-Latin script could have been resolved outside the DNS. Since it's determined to provide the solution within the DNS for whatever reasons--and thus regulated or constrained by the DNS , the solution should at least fulfil its fundamental mission--useful to users. Hong On 10/18/06, Siavash Shahshahani <shahshah@xxxxxxxx> wrote: 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
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