[governance] Re: ICANN Successfully Conducts Laboratory Tests of Internationalised Domain Names

[subbiah]

I can't believe I am actually agreeing with Stephane on this one,

(1) IDN as used today, was originally conceived by the Singapore team 
back in 1997/8 precisely so that the labels on the wire will all be 
effectively in ascii. Therefore by design they were not expected to 
cause any problems inherent in the non-English script themselves. That 
was the whole point. So its no surprise it works. While not in my mind 
totally useless as Stephane states, the current tests would never (:-)) 
have failed.

(2) The ICANN test just announced was not in the full root but rather a 
lab-like, more limited environment. Similar tests were successfully 
conducted back in the year-long Asian testbed in 1998/9 by APNG.

(3) As for a real-life test in large numbers on a large fraction of  net 
users, while ICANN prepares to do one, a very close cousin has been 
ongoing in real commercial-life for 3 or more years in China involving 
over a 100M end-users and many tens of thousands of issued names, in the 
case of the Chinese script (which is about different as a script as you 
can imagine from ASCII, not that it matters from a puny code point of 
view). Similar efforts in other scripts but in smaller size are also 
ongoing for a number of years in a number of other countries/scripts, 
for example the Arab League sponsored (22 Arabic country Arabic script 
effort) with the participation of the monopoly national ISPs of several 
Arabic countries.

Cheers

Subbiah


Stephane Bortzmeyer wrote:

>>Anyone interested in the deployment of IDNs might be interested
>>yesterday's announcement of the successful conclusion of laboratory
>>tests of internationalised TLDs in a setting corresponding to the
>>public root.
>>    
>>
>
>No, it is completely useless. Since a Punycode name is a regular
>domain name, there was nothing to test and the authors of the
>different documents have some merit to be able to produce even these
>few pages.
>
>As the report says:
>
>  
>
>>   No impact at all could be detected. All involved systems behaved
>>   exactly as expected.
>>    
>>
>
>A lot of ICANN's money spent on that. Autonomica can thank them. (Of
>course, ICANN's primary motive was probably more to procrastinate
>about IDN.)
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