[governance] Re: IDN's Internationalized Domain Names - A New

[Milton L Mueller]

I am not disagreeing with John but for better or worse, we seem to be missing what ICANN really did. Of course it did not do the technical work - that is not its mission. What it did was policy work, act as a gatekeeper to the root, and specifically make the decision that ccTLD operators would have a privileged right to enter the IDN space first. I am deliberately describing that decision in as neutral terms as I can - I suspect most of you know my opinion of it - but at least let's be accurate about what ICANN does and does not do.

--MM

> -----Original Message-----
> From: John Levine [mailto:icggov at johnlevine.com]
> 
> ICANN was shouting "Hey! Look at me!" while other people did the real
> work.
> 
> The IETF IDNA group did a vast amount of work, including a recently
> completed update, to deal with all of the nitpicky stuff about what
> characters are allowed in what scripts.  Programmers all over the
> world wrote, debugged, and deployed punycode libraries to implement
> the IDN specs.
> 
> ICANN did a handful of tiny tests which did nothing more than confirm
> that everyone else had already done the real work.
> 
> R's,
> John
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