[gnso-idn-wg] Excepts from Vint Cerf's speech at the Intenret Governance Forum related to IDNs

["Bruce Tonkin" <Bruce.Tonkin@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

From:

http://www.icann.org/announcements/announcement-1-30oct06.htm


One of the most important aspects of the Internet is the ability for
every user to make unambiguous references to every registered domain
name. Historically, this global feature has been achieved in part by
restricting host domain names to be expressed in a small subset of the
Latin characters A-Z, the digits 0-9 and the hyphen "-". It is well
understood that this will not suffice for users whose native languages
use characters other than these. At the same time, it is vital to
preserve the global ability to refer to and use every domain name. This
global interoperability needs to be preserved especially as new
languages are supported by the UNICODE system through the addition of
new characters needed to express them. 

It is utterly critical to appreciate that domain names are NOT general
natural language expressions. They are simply identifiers that help
users uniquely reference information in the Internet using strings of
characters grouped into a sequence of labels that make up domain names.
They must be unique, and names registered today must continue to work
into the distant future, no matter what new characters are added to
UNICODE to support the expression of additional written languages. To
assure this stability and global interoperability, it is necessary to
permit only a carefully chosen subset of all possible characters in
UNICODE to be used in domain names. Work in this area will be discussed
in other sessions during this Internet Governance Forum so I will simply
underscore here that the work is technically challenging and will
require extraordinary expertise. 

It is understandable that proponents of IDNs are eager to make progress.
ICANN is already conducting tests to determine the readiness of the root
zone file and its associated root servers and resolvers to house or work
with internationalized top level domains. Adding IDNs at all levels in
the domain names system potentially affects every application that makes
use of domain names. The mechanisms of the domain name system make
demands on the normalization and matching of domain name strings that
far exceed the simpler requirement that natural language strings be
renderable using UNICODE. A misstep in the specifications of the IDN
rules could easily and permanently break the Internet into
non-interoperable components. New work in the Internet Engineering Task
Force and in the ICANN committee on IDNs, among others, is pointing the
way towards specific solutions.