[governance] Response to Stephane Bortzmeyer on IDN
subbiah
subbiah at i-dns.net
Fri Feb 23 01:53:03 EST 2007
Dear All,
I don't know where to begin my response to the claims made by Stephane
about 10 days ago ( some personal matters prevent me from “living on
email”). This will be long.
Given the many false facts I see in the response, I will attempt to
address the key points for the sake of the many here who may not be "IDN
history experts" and have no time to conduct extensive personal history
research. I have tried to keep it short, but the history is so long and
complex that even so-called self-described experts on "IDN" routinely
get the history wrong. And I felt that while I do not expect to be
successful in re-educating the strongly biased ignorant, I could at
least attempt to educate the many eminent people who participate in this
forum with both very public facts and my own personal memories and
involvement with IDN. I Leave it up to you make your judgments. I
probably will not write any more emails on the matter UNLESS someone
other than the current biased gentleman cares to ask a specific question
of me.
As for Stephane, I guess the "holocaust did not happen either" and so I
do not have the slightest expectation that I will change his mind and in
fact have no real desire to do so. Also it is rather disturbing to be
invited to participate in a community of Internet eminents interested in
the governance of the Virtual World labeled as the "Civil Society", to
receive as his first email a note that is neither "civil" nor be
described as "sociable".
Let me address the points in this email and then send 2 other emails as
Appendices with links to hundreds of publications and facts etc. as
public evidence.
(1) I am sorry for the fact that the link that I claimed to have the
historical record of the 10+ Asian-country 1 year test-bed in 1998/1999
conducted by APNG (the Asian "ICANN" that preceded ICANN by several
years and still functions with annual meetings they conduct of some 5000
Internet folks in Asia-Pacific and the parent of APNIC) did not work at
"i-dns.org". It was working the last I checked a year ago and has been
continually working since 1998/9. After I ran the test bed personally
and it was closed in 1999, I have not been responsible for maintaining
it. I have now further checked. It appears that it was always forwarding
to a web page within the APNG main web-site archives – i.e. the actual
contents of the test bed report was never hosted directly at "i-dns.org"
but rather at another location within the APNG web-site. And for some
lack of oversight/technical reasons the "forwarding mechanism" has been
switched off. Meanwhile I give you the actual underlying link, which has
been and is still now identical at
http://www.apng.org/old/commission/idns/
(2) You claim a revisionist history, that the East had nothing to do
with early invention and promotion while in actuality the West, ICANN
included, was strongly disinterested. Your view would seem to be at
great odds with the details at wikipedia under "IDN" or
"Internationalized Domain Names" which has been around for a number of
years and modified or edited by all with interest. The link is at
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internationalized_domain_name but I am also
sending you the relevant “Early History of IDN “ section as a cut/paste
in a following email entitled as Appendix 1. You may note the
connections between my company i-dns.net and the origins of IDN at the
National University of Singapore and the many introductory workshops
(some a few days long) that our then student, James Seng, gave under my
direction at KRNIC, JPNIC (the precursor of JPRS), Academia Sinica
(precursor of TWNIC) etc. Also you may note Prof. Tan Tin Wee conducted
a BOF (Birds of a Feather workshop) at INET 1998 in Geneva.
In particular this history describes many publications along the way
with one of the earliest by Prof. Tan Tin Wee in 1998 in Connect-World
where he devotes an entire section titled - Crossing the Linguistic
Barrier: iDNS - to IDN testing in the Asian community.
http://www.connect-world.com/articles/old_articles/Dr-TanTinWee.htm
Another early publication in the "West" was an article in the very
prominent journal (that reports extensively on ITU etc) "Communications
Week" after the APRICOT March 99 Singapore IDN workshop (attended by
300+ Asian delegates and immediately after ICANN's first meeting which
happened to be in Singapore too) by Ken Cukier featuring our IDN work
and our then-student James Seng, with a prominent photo of him I believe
on the cover page. This is the same Ken who later became European editor
of Red Herring (the dot-com boom era VC bible-magazine that still
continues), then a stint at Harvard University (a PhD on Internet
history including IDN I think) and now tech-journalist at the Economist
who has since written about IDN for the Economist too.
In fact there were also a number of newspaper articles in prominent
Chinese computer journals published by the Chinese Ministry of
Information Industry in Beijing when Prof. Tan visited CNNIC in 1998 and
demonstrated Chinese IDN publicly. I believe there is even a photo of
him with the current director general of CNNIC, Mao Wei. If necessary I
could dig them up as hardcopy and scan into Jpeg for posting. But based
on Stephane’s earlier comments, I guess since these articles are in
"Chinese" and not in English they cannot possibly be true and there
would be no point in my doing so.
(3) As for my own Company's involvement and having no connection to
essentially all the versions of IDN software out there today here are a
number of facts. Actually about a 1000 publications in almost a 100
countries - in pretty much the top newspapers of each country - suggest
otherwise. Since the printed output of all these articles - in
publications like Asahi Shimbun of Japan, Far Eastern Economic Review,
The Hindu and Business Times of India, Straits Times, People's Daily of
China, Haaretz (Israel), Wall Street Journal, CNBC, Cnet etc etc from
Egypt to Australia - the bulk in 2000 but many in the years since - will
be thousands of pages , I cut/paste a partial list of the "titles ",
date and publication name from i-dns.net's company web-site at the
bottom of this email as Appendix 2. The actual contents can all be
visited by simply going to the company web site at "www.i-dns.net" and
exploring the extensive archives under "Visit the Press Room".
I would like to add that a number of these publications featured photos
of local ministers of communication etc. launching commercial full IDN
service in local languages in 1999-2001 - from Taiwan, to Israel to
India. In some of these there are even pictures of myself co-launching
as in the case with the man who was more or less the previous Deputy
Prime Minister of India.
(4) Stephane claims that there are a few versions of IDN that are
available that could not possibly have anything to do with my company or
Singapore etc.
(a) Verisign :
Verisign approached me personally in January 2000 and eventually made a
multi-million dollar investment in our company to license/acquire all
the IDN technology which they then used in November 2000 for the
ICANN-Test bed of IDN.com etc. in well over a 100 languages and they
sold commercially some 1 million names (mostly Chinese, Japanese and
Korean) for around $70M end-user revenue in just 4 weeks or so. The fact
of this investment was detailed all over Wall Street by analysts at that
time. Moreover there were dozens of worldwide publications, mostly in
the West, that reported on this partnership - I attach a few links,
including a Press Release by Verisign itself and others in August 2000
where Verisign’s and Network Solution’s spokespeople are quoted about
licensing technology from i-DNS.net. (The actual content is on
www.i-dns.net <http://www.i-dns.net/> under “Visit Press Room”). Note
that the publications include Yahoo, Forbes, ComputerWorld, Infoworld,
CNET that Stephane may have heard of, even though the news was reported
as far as away in India, China, Thailand, Hong Kong etc. Also note the
media reports which detail that the dot TV and dot cc cctld
commercially-operated registries, which have since 2002 been purchased
by Verisign, also independently licensed IDN technology from I-DNS.net
in 2000.
• i-DNS in pact with Network Solutions Registry
<http://www.i-dns.net/newsroom/news/IN000831-01.html.en>
India, The Financial Express, 31 August 2000
• Multi-language domains on horizon
<http://www.i-dns.net/newsroom/news/HK000829-01.html.en>
Online, IDG.com.hk, 29 August 2000
• i-DNS.net International joins NSI
<http://www.i-dns.net/newsroom/news/TH000828-01.html.en>
Thailand, Krungthep Turakij, 28 August 2000
• iDNS makes way for multilingual domain names
<http://www.i-dns.net/newsroom/news/IN000826-01.html.en>
Online, ZDNet.com, 26 August 2000
• i-DNS.net and NSI Offers Multilingual Domain Name Registration
Services <http://www.i-dns.net/newsroom/news/CN000825-01.html.en>
China, China Byte, 25 August 2000
• i-DNS.net Deploys Multilingual DNS Technology with NSI
<http://www.i-dns.net/newsroom/news/HK000825-03.html.en>
Online, hk.myinfoage.com, 25 August 2000
• i-DNS to provide technology for multilingual domain names
<http://www.i-dns.net/newsroom/news/GE000825-01.html.en>
Online, itdaily.com, 25 August 2000
• NSI To Test Multilingual Domain Name System
<http://www.i-dns.net/newsroom/news/US000823-01.html.en>
Online, Computer World, 23 August 2000
*• i-DNS.net International Announces Agreement With Network Solutions
Registry <http://www.i-dns.net/newsroom/news/I-US000823-01.html.en>
General, i-DNS.net International, 23 August 2000*
• Multilingual domain names promoted
<http://www.i-dns.net/newsroom/news/US000822-05.html.en>
Online, infoworld.com, 22 August 2000
• VeriSign's Network Solutions Unit to Add Web Names
<http://www.i-dns.net/newsroom/news/US000822-04.html.en>
Online, CNET.com, 22 August 2000
• Network Solutions Registry Announces Statement of Direction On
Multilingual Domain Names
<http://www.i-dns.net/newsroom/news/US000822-03.html.en>
Online, Forbes.com, 22 August 2000
• Network Solutions Registry Announces Statement of Direction On
Multilingual Domain Names
<http://www.i-dns.net/newsroom/news/US000822-03.html.en>
Online, yahoo.com, 22 August 2000
• NSI Registry to Work With i-DNS.net To Enable Multilingual Domain
Names on the Internet
<http://www.i-dns.net/newsroom/news/US000822-01.html.en>
USA, Network Solutions Inc., 22 August 2000
*• dotTV Partners With i-DNS.net To Offer Multilingual Domain Names
<http://www.i-dns.net/newsroom/news/I-US000925-01.html.en>
General, i-DNS.net International, 25 September 2000***
• eNIC Corporation Becomes First Registry to Offer Domain Names in Asian
Languages <http://www.i-dns.net/newsroom/news/US000815-01.html.en>
Online, yahoo.com, 15 August 2000
(b) JPRS, Japan
In 1998 I personally co-signed a license to test our Singapore
University software with the Research Institute related to JPNIC which
was then run by Prof. Goto-San. Their student Yoneya spent a few years
afterwards implementing and testing our technology at JPNIC. JPNIC
tested it starting in 1998 itself and gave many reports at various
international meetings, starting with APRICOT 1999, 2000 etc. in front
of thousands of attendees. A gentleman by the name of Hiro Hotta of NTT
Japan, who came to learn of IDN partly thru me at INET 1999 San Jose,
and who had been seconded to JPNIC from NTT also got involved in this
Japanese effort reproducing/improving what we gave them. Later JPNIC
spun-off its registry - in essence JPNIC became a commercial private
vehicle with Hotta moving to lead the IDN effort within JPRS. Today he
is on all prominent ICANN IDN Committees, often leading them like the
ICANN cctld IDN group now and the previous ICANN IDN.ascii policy
committee for years. Further our company - i-dns.net- assisted JPRS
itself finally launch a commercial service in 2003/4 using our plug-ins
– at the time of the launch they used 2 plug-ins – one from us directly
and the other from Verisign (indirectly from us).
(c) CNNIC, China.
I personally flew in December 1998 with a Singapore student whose
god-uncle happened to be at the time the Minister of Science in China -
to visit the Minister and also visit CNNIC to first sign a license for
them to test the university-version of the IDN software in preparation
for the Asian IDN test bed of 1998/1999. After having launched a
commercial version in Taiwan with the Taiwanese Minister of
Communication (see press articles in Taiwan press in Appendix 2) in
December 1999, we continued to assist the mainland Chinese technically
for years, from the university and later thru our company, i-dns.net.
Eventually we helped them re-launch in 2004 the full Chinese. Chinese
IDN service that they operate today after signing a further for-profit
licensing agreement with them in 2003. While little known to the West or
ICANN, this service (with roots in a 2000 original launch) was
re-started in a big way in 2004, with by late 2005 many tens of millions
of plug-ins distributed and most major ISPs (basically all ISPs are
controlled by Ministry) patched. This service was well publicized in all
major newspapers and by the communist party and ministers in keynote
speeches within China in 2004, 2005 etc but hardly noticed in the West.
By March 2006 when it was "discovered" by Western reporters and ICANN
(100’s of articles in all major Western papers – in many of which I was
quoted) , virtually all Internet users in China (now numbering
140Million) were IDN-enabled and tens of thousands of IDN names sold and
operational for a number of years. Of course Stephane has already
suggested that if its “not reported” in English than it simply does not
exist.
(c) GNU version.
Since 1998 we (Singapore University and the University incubator company
after that which I ran, BIX and the subsequent spin-off I-dns.net) have
aggressively taught the world about IDN - all technical details etc and
helped people re-implement. Most major Asian NICs were the benefactors
of Singapore-paid detailed workshops on IDN in 1998/9 - China, Taiwan,
Singapore, Korea, and Japan etc. When ICANN and IETF chose to show no
interest for almost two years - we helped create Asian forums to discuss
this - the Asian test bed, Asian meetings-APRICOT and also MINC - the
Multi-Lingual Internet Consortium (MINC) created to promote IDN
worldwide (its 7-year history is at
http://archive.minc.org/about/history/ ). Then at the June 1998 INET
meeting at San Jose, I was personally asked by Patrick Fahlstrom - then
a key figure at IETF and later a co-author of IDN standards and now on
the Internet Architecture Board (IAB) and its principal guy for IDN - to
help form an IETF working group on IDN, which we obliged with. I then
funded James Seng, our CTO of i-dns.net by then, to chair it for the 4
years it took to finally publish the public IDNA standard.. Later when
ICANN was forced to enter IDN after Verisign threatened to launch
the-IDN they bought from us, without ICANN blessing - ICANN immediately
asked my company and MINC to create a last minute workshop at the ICANN
November 2000 meeting in LA to introduce IDN, which we did - and it was
an 500+ person standing room audience only success. This was then
quickly followed by requests to my company directly and via MINC in 2000
and following years to arrange workshops for ITU and WIPO on IDN. This
is how these organizations learnt about IDN. In fact even as 10 months
ago in April 2006, ITU and UNESCO had their first very significant
IDN/multilingual conference - the bulk of the speakers on the topic was
provided by MINC and I co-led the worldwide speaker-recruitment.
I think it’s clear we at Singapore University and later at the i-dns.net
company did a very good job in publicizing IDN and in all its gory
detail and sheperding it to a global IDNA standard. So much so that GNU
and other public versions have come to be available widely by simply
copying what we have detailed over and over again worldwide since 1998
or simply the final IDNS standard. This is not rocket science and anyway
we repeatedly published the blueprints for the rocket for a decade.
(d) Microsoft IE7 built-in IDN.
James Seng and I recruited a low-level Microsoft Unicode engineer to
attend our IDN meetings in Asia back in 1999. They have continued to
attend or keep an eye on IDN since. Later unsuccessful attempts to
persuade Microsoft to adopt IDN were conducted in 2000/2001 at executive
level by our VC investors - at top 10 people at Microsoft level. Since
2002 we (and others like Verisign) have had on-off discussions with
Microsoft. And finally while Microsoft was beta-testing and implementing
it about 12 months ago, I personally had some conference calls to the
technical team-head that was implementing it with my company's engineers.
(e) Mozilla/Netscape built-in plug-ins of 2 years ago.
One of my and Prof. Tan' Singapore students (now at Princeton) was sent
by us to work at Netscape in Silicon Valley when they first developed
their non-English browsers in 1996 etc. Bob Jung who essentially headed
the International tech team at Netscape when Netscape was less than 20
employees or so used our student to program the first Chinese-capable
Netscape browser while I supervised the student's time in Silicon Valley
(I was a Professor at Stanford University as well). Years later in 2001,
Bob bundled our i-dns.net company’s IDN plug-in into early Mozilla that
was being distributed. The plans he had for inclusion in Netscape, as
well as directly into the browser were shelved because Netscape was
beginning to go bankrupt because of Microsoft. Eventually after the
future of Mozilla and Netscape was settled via the open source
community, both included IDN into the core browser itself. Bob Jung has
been for the past year the CTO of all things international at Google and
occasionally consults me on multilingual matters.
(f) IBM version.
Back in 2001, some researchers at IBM participated in our IDN forums we
conducted and started developing freeware. It should be noted that from
2000 to 2002, Irving-Berger Wladowsky was one of the 5 Board of
Director’s of our company – I-dns.net. From then until now he was
probably in the top 5 executives at IBM and their main strategy guru
with a further additional official role then as IBM’s “Internet Czar”
and in recent years as its “Open Source and Linux Czar”.
(5) I think its clear that we at Singapore and later at the i-dns,.net
company did a very good job of educating and popularizing this freely to
one and all (while losing many tens of millions of dollars to do so) –
even those like that ICANN and IETF that were utterly disinterested for
years - that now the whole world, particularly the likes of the Western
world, thinks it was invented in the West. With revisionist IDN experts
like Stephane insisting for now that Verisign, IBM etc. and the West
having invented it, it won’t be long before the Western-controlled ICANN
(as it already has so far) awards full IDN business rights to the
Western-dominated commercial registries to sell the “Eastern” people’s
names in their own languages at high speculative prices back to them.
And when asked why, the West will reply – “because remember, we invented
it”.
Finally, having I believe addressed all of Stephane’s “facts”, I would
like to end by discussing something very serious that the Civil Society
group at large may care about.
For the past two years good old speculation in English domain names is
back under the new label “investment”. Every week thousands of English
names trade second-hand for in excess of $20000 and a handful a week
trade above a $1M each (with a few hitting $10M) in the secondary
market. Given that there are 112 million ASCII names selling initially
for $10 to $20 dollars a year, the original market is only about $2 to
$3Billion. However assuming there are 1M “very good names”, and 10M
valuable names (any company would pay $1000 for its domain) based on
auction-asset values being seen, the current asset value of ASCII domain
names is likely to be in excess of half a trillion dollars – you can buy
all of Africa and parts of South America for that or 5% of all physical
Real Estate in USA. Roger Collins, the founder/owner of Afternic, the
major player that created (together with Sedo) the modern auction –
secondary market for domains (which has 1M domains listed for prices
upwards of a few thousand dollars each), thought that my estimates were
credible and likely to continue rising. Moreover, ICANN in its wisdom
has recently renegotiated its contracts with all major gtld registries
(save Verisign which wants the same privilege but for now is only
gettingh 10% automatic yearly increase on $5 price) to theoretically
allow them to charge ANY price for even renewals. While the registries
will slowly push for traffic-based pricing for domain renewals ( Gee,
you get a lot of traffic – guess your domain is worth $20 000 a year to
renew), ICANN already launched the new TLD .mobi where on Day 1 they
were allowed to auction 10 reserved names for upwards $200 000 each.
They probably made more money on those few auctioned names then on
selling regularly priced 100 000 names at launch. So speculative (oops
investment) prices will not only be in secondary market, it has already
started in primary market and sanctioned by ICANN.
Well the auction-action is now moving to IDN and at places like
IDN-Forum, people who made money on recent ASCII domain speculation, are
fast buying up IDN – mostly western people since the Ethiopians and
Laotians have not heard of the availability (the major Western
registries do not have the money to educate but do have the resources to
conduct sales J ) of their IDN names under global TLDs and even if they
did they do not have the money to pay any more than the $10 etc. In my
estimate, since IDN-capability will be in 1.5 Billion Internet
user-browsers by end of 2007, and maybe 90% of global adults within 5 to
10 years, within a few years there will be maybe 100M or more IDN names
(there are already close to 3M half-baked IDN.ascii ones) worth the
better part of a trillion dollars owned by rich Western folk, who would
be happy to resell it to the native folk. And they would have bought it
from rich Western companies, authorized by ICANN. And this would be
morally acceptable since according to even the “non-profit oriented”
experts like Stephane from the “civil society” it was after all
“invented by the West”.
Anyway, I apologize for the tone and length of my reply. But a “language
colonization” of the same extent in dollar and cultural terms as the
original European land-based one is likely to happen shortly and
self-appointed IDN experts like Stephane are intentionally or
unintentionally abetting it as we speak.
And I have every right to feel awful about it, since I helped invent it
(and even coined the term IDN) and was instrumental in raising the first
$50M for popularizing it for almost a decade with the mistaken pride
that here was an invention that I could feel good about – one that by
its very nature helped the ethnic poor first, before the globalised
“Western rich”. Stupid me.
Cheers
Subbiah
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