[governance] Friday morning... (Arabic Domain Name) Some Background
S. Subbiah
subbiah at i-dns.net
Fri May 7 14:12:13 EDT 2010
Thank you all for pointing out the early history of modern IDN since its
inception in 1997 in Singapore. And it is indeed great that ICANN has
moved us a step forward in this 13 year saga finally. It is also true
that the history posted is only upto 2007 and since then much work has
been done by IDNABIS at IETF and also within ICANN.
But I would like to put this in context for the record using some
highlights. In 1999 after ICANN Chair was approached (after both IDN abd
IDNemail were developed and tested in Asian labs in hundreds of
languages) the response was "Please go learn English". Then Asians from
a dozen countries (the same CNNIC, TWNIC, JPNIC etc as today)
particpated in a year long Asia-wide testbed that I oversaw. By then,
collective expense was well over a few million dollars and a hundred
people working on implementations and testing across Asia. Ironically
news of this spread beyond Asia and I recall a Prof. Zoman (formerly
head of Saudi NIC - the same that launched today) contacted us and we
responded that we did not have finances yet to accomodate non-Asian
scripts for now. Ditto Russian interest. After a year, commercial
deployment via i-dns.net (a Singapore university spin-off that I
co-founded) began based on an in-country-resolution only approach (with
downloadable plug-ins for out of country) starting in 1999 with a
Minister's approval in Taiwan. Just then IETF took an interest, after
having shown little interest the year before and started on its much
delayed path to IDNA in 2003 with the Singapore team playing a
leadership role. In 2000 and 2001 at least 15 in-country full IDN.IDN
deployments in much of the IDN world (example Chinese, India, Israel,
Russia, Thailand, Korea etc) were launched with local Information or in
some cases Prime Ministers in attendance. Thousands of articles were
published in the world's best journals/tv in the native langauges as
well as mainstream English media - much of the links are in the
press-room at www.i-dns.net.
Then Verisign licensed this technology and went ahead to launch
half-IDN and half-ASCII hybrid domains - IDN.ascii - in late 2000. It
was only then ICANN had no choice but to enter the IDN issue. While
unable to stop the Verisign launch at the last minute, they basically
neutered IDN.ascii by forcing it to be only usable via plug-ins. A
million people who bought names never got it to work. There was never an
apology from anyone in the West to all the millions in the East who
bought them. Many registars went bankrupt and there were goverment fraud
investigations in Korea relating to these Korean.ascii names. Finally
for the few who hung on renewing the names, they worked in 2007 and 2008
when Microsoft and others fixed their browsers - and that had little to
do with ICANN.
With ICANN's entry and committees to look into IDN.IDN in 2001 the
locally-deployed world paused its efforts (thru highly active
coordinating establishments like MINC and even some interest from ITU).
They took ICANN's commitments to coordinate this at face value and also
simultaneoulsy waited for the perenially almost-ready IDNA standard from
IETF. Then things dragged and ICANN was busy with its own internal
non-third world issues. Neverthless it continued to mouth commitment
while in reality it lost interest in IDN.IDN citing various relatively
minor excuses (most of these of its own making).
The human cost was fairly enormous - some of the other IDN companies
that had emerged globally went bankrupt - we took a big hit (even within
Verisign most of the IDN went through large turnover and changes),
people lost jobs, risk-taking early-adopter country-nic chiefs and
politicans got fired, people postponed having children, many marriages
dissolved. By my estimate collectively to date about US$200 million in
today's dollars was lost by investors - perhaps as much as $100M on the
Singapore side (I raised much of it). While not belittling those with
relatively safe jobs who spend enormous time particpating in efforts
like IDNBIS often in their spare time, I would like to point out that
these personal sacrifices/losses are likley to be outshadowed by the
just-mentioned human cost.
By 2004 some of these in-country efforts had fizzled but a few in the
stronger countries grew stronger while ICANN its safe to say pretended
not to notice. Countries like China that badly needed it decided to grow
their in-country deployments toward 100% usability within. By 2005/6
they had hundreds of millions of users being able to use the hundreds of
thousands of issued full IDN.IDNs. Ironically, at one point even in
Egypt, a commercial Arabic.arabic launch with local ISPs, with Ministry
knowledge was usable by 60% of Internet users by 2002 and still now
(gTLDs, not the now announced IDN ccTLD). By 2007 - significant use
relative to the country-size existed with upwards of 70% region-wide
usability (users who could resolve it without a plugin) existed in a few
countries - like China, Korea, Israel, even 2 small Gulf arabic
countries etc. These accounted for at least 25% of the world's
population that truly needs IDN.IDN and live in non-latin script
countries. (This non-ICANN sanctioned efforts reach may have since grown
from 25% and closer to 40% of the IDN.IDN needy with more launches ahead
of ICANN). When the well-established Chinese effort was "discovered" by
Western media in 2007, ICANN's embarrased response was to say it was
techncially not true to the media. It was quickly disproven by impartial
Western Internet engineer researchers who tested - but these accounts
received only limited media coverage. Finally this embarrasment and the
sure knowledge that large isalnds have already gone off to do their own
thing and it would be difficult to bring them back, spurred ICANN's
final interest in IDN in 2007/8.
Even then ICANN found it impossible to get its act together as fast as
it had promised and it has taken until mid-2010 to put just the first
stage of the first part into action - the fast-track within ccTLDs. The
slow track is many years away and the gTLD space is even further away
owing to ICANN's inisistence policy-wise to merge new ASCII gTLDS
(mostly not needed urgently beyond what we already have) with new IDN
TLDs (long needed urgently). It is this period from 2007 that is
well-documented and publicised by ICANN that is missing in the "outdated
write-up". IDNABIS was re-activated at IETF to improve the IDNS 2003
standrad that even then at birth was knowingly made techncially
less-restrivtive since the engineers did not wish to define how it was
deployed politically. But ICANN used that in 2003 to launch further
IDN.ascii deploymnents but crucially without enforcing the policy
recomendations from IETF. And yes thereby causing a big mess, that now
the IETFBIS group had to go in and clean up and make the standard more
restrictive, along with other things. It was necessary work and thank
you. Interestingly all the non-ICANN deployments since 1999 have always
deployed IDN in a technically more restrictive manner than IDNA's
recomendation or ICANN's deployment and this mess was and is mostly
avoided. Everyone knows ICANN botched the deployment and that history
(we have 2 million plus names out there that they cannot take back with
these potential problems) and the need for "backward comnatibility" is
still making current deployment strategy less than ideal.
However the main concept and approach to IDN is unchanged from the
original Singapore invention in 1997 and ICANN's refusal to consider
putting it in the root in early 1999 at ICANN's first meeting. While it
was improved on the margins, the deployment by ICANN post 2003 standard
was abominable and the problems would not have been any worse than if
the original without improvements had been inserted in root in 1999 in
some languages. The gains for culture and language around the world
would have far offset any problems. We helped lose a generation of
native non-latin script speaking ability to English/Internet while
waiting for ICANN to acknowledge the relatively obvious.
So yes its a great day for the world - but its been a great day for
sometime in China and elsewhere for years. It is simply inexcusable to
start its main press release on its site saying "For the first time in
the history of the Internet.... ". (see www.icann.org). Especailly since
ICANN's role has been at best mixed and arguably amongst all the players
involved ICANN was the one who delayed it the most (when it should have
been the other way around). At any rate an organisation that insists on
airbrushing and hiding the truth and not admitting the facts has in my
opinion a dubious future. And it continues to take credit by vagueness
and misinformation. A running joke in the Asian IDN community where a
bunch of pan-Asian nerds (Indian, Chinese, Malaysian, Korean, Japanese
and other engineers) came together from all over Asia as never before
and actually contributed an Internet or IT standard without Western help
is that IDN was invented by a Western blonde.
The irony of it all.
But still another great day for IDN - a term I coined - and a great day
for the real reason why so many primarily Asians and other non-Latin
speakers went well before ICANN with IDNs: Some for money/fame but all
for the desire driven by much pride to make their own language relavant
for themselves and their relatives and countrymen who did not have the
privilege to learn English.
And again thank you for pointing out the early history.
Cheers
Subbiah
Ginger Paque wrote:
> Indeed, it is 2007 Olivier :) If anyone has an updated timeline,
> please post it! Thanks. gp
>
> On 5/7/2010 10:59 AM, Olivier MJ Crepin-Leblond wrote:
>
>> Thanks for the pointer, Ginger. A milestone indeed, but the paper
>> below is really out of date. It does not mention the extraordinary
>> amount of work that was done by volunteers in the IDNABIS IETF
>> working group and the work also done within ICANN.
>>
>> Having witnessed so many of the workings of these milestone events
>> (including the coming on line of several countries), I sometimes wish
>> there was a "lost Internet heroes" hall of fame, to mention the
>> hundreds of volunteers who took their time to work on these matters,
>> free of charge, sometimes incurring expenses, instead of spending
>> their time on more ludic matters. I guess history in general is made
>> up of these individual experiences.
>>
>> Milestones such as the one about IDNs being put in use, are the
>> celebrations of those individuals. Thank you all.
>>
>> Kind regards,
>>
>> Olivier
>>
>> Le 07/05/2010 16:01, Ginger Paque a écrit :
>>
>>> I did some searches, trying to better understand the background to
>>> today's milestone. I found a timeline by Prof. S. Subbiah (IGC
>>> member) on Ian Peter's (another IGC member and former
>>> co-coordinator) weblog.
>>>
>>> Published in May 2007, Ian introduced it like this:
>>>
>>> *"Thanks to Prof. S. Subbiah from Singapore for this excellent short
>>> history of the attempts to internationalise domain names.*
>>>
>>> *"There is much still to be done!"*
>>>
>>> http://ianpeter.wordpress.com/2007/05/10/history-of-internationalised-domain-names/
>>>
>>> History of IDN
>>>
>>> * 12/96: Martin Duerst’s original Internet Draft proposing UTF5 (the
>>> first incarnation of what is known today as ACE)- UTF-5 was first
>>> defined by Martin Duerst at the University of Zürich in [3]
>>> <http://tools.ietf.org/html/draft-duerst-dns-i18n-00%7Cdraft-duerst-dns-i18n-00.txt>[4]
>>> <http://archive.minc.org/about/history/>[5]
>>>
>>> ( Subbiah comments: a precursor idea that was never implemented and
>>> would not have worked as proposed. Martin later collaborated with
>>> the Singapore team which was not aware of his previous suggestion
>>> til much later))
>>> <http://www.connect-world.com/articles/old_articles/Dr-TanTinWee.htm>
>>> * 03/98: Early Research on IDN at National University of Singapore
>>> (NUS), Center for Internet Research (formerly Internet Research and
>>> Development Unit – IRDU) led by Prof. Tan Tin Wee (IDN Project team
>>> – Lim Juay Kwang and Leong Kok Yong) and subsequently continued
>>> under a team at Bioinformatrix Pte. Ltd. (BIX Pte. Ltd.)
>>> - a NUS spin-off company led by Prof. S. Subbiah.
>>> * July 98: Geneva INET’98 conference with a BoF discussion on iDNS
>>> and APNG General Meeting and Working Group meeting.
>>> * 07/98: Asia Pacific Networking Group (APNG, now still in existence
>>> [6] <http://www.apng.org/> and distinct from a gathering known as APSTAR
>>> <http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=APSTAR&action=edit> [7]
>>> <http://www.apstar.org/>) iDNS Working Group formed. [8]
>>> <http://www.apng.org/old/commission/idns/>
>>> * 10/98: James Seng <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Seng> was
>>> recruited to lead further IDN development at BIX Pte. Ltd. by Prof.
>>> S. Subbiah.
>>> * 02/99: iDNS Testbed launched by BIX Pte. Ltd. under the auspicies
>>> of APNG with participation from CNNIC
>>> <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CNNIC>, JPNIC
>>> <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Japan_Network_Information_Center>,
>>> KRNIC, TWNIC, THNIC, HKNIC and SGNIC led by James Seng
>>> <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Seng> [9]
>>> <http://www.minc.org/about/history/idns/idomain/>
>>>
>>> * 02/99: Presentation of Report on IDN at Joint APNG-APTLD meeting,
>>> at APRICOT’99
>>> * 03/99: Endorsement of the IDN Report at APNG General Meeting 1
>>> March 1999.
>>> * 06/99: Grant application by APNG jointly with the Centre for
>>> Internet Research (CIR), National University of Singapore, to the
>>> International Development Research Center (IDRC), a Canadian
>>> Government funded international organisation to work on IDN for
>>> IPv6. This APNG Project was funded under the Pan Asia R&D Grant
>>> administered on behalf of IDRC by the Canadian Committee on
>>> Occupational Health and Safety (CCOHS). Principal Investigator: Tan
>>> Tin Wee of National University of Singapore. [10]
>>> <http://www.apng.org/old/commission/idns/ipv6/>
>>> * 07/99 Tout, Walid R. (WALID Inc.) Filed IDNA patent application
>>> number US1999000358043 Method and system for internationalizing
>>> domain names. Published 2001-01-30 [11]
>>> <http://www.delphion.com/details?&pn=US06182148__>
>>>
>>> * 07/99: [12]
>>> <http://mirrors.isc.org/pub/www.watersprings.org/pub/id/draft-jseng-utf5-00.txt>;
>>> Renewed 2000 [13]
>>> <http://www.nic.ad.jp/ja/idn/mdnkit/download/documents/mdnkit-2.4-doc/reference/draft/draft-jseng-utf5-01.txt>
>>> Internet Draft on UTF5 by James Seng, Martin Duerst and Tan Tin Wee.
>>>
>>> * 08/99: APTLD and APNG forms a working group
>>> <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Working_group> to look into IDN
>>> issues chaired by Kilnam Chon. [14]
>>> <http://www.minc.org/about/history/idns/iname/>
>>> * 10/99: BIX Pte. Ltd. and National University of Singapore together
>>> with New York Venture Capital investors, General Atlantic Partners,
>>> spun-off the IDN effort into 2 new Singapore companies – i-DNS.net
>>> International Inc. and i-Email.net Pte. Ltd. that created the first
>>> commercial implementation of an IDN Solution for both domain names
>>> and IDN email addresses respectively.
>>> * 11/99: IETF <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IETF> IDN
>>> Birds-of-Feather in Washington was initiated by i-DNS.net at the
>>> request of IETF officials.
>>> * 12/99: i-DNS.net InternationalPte. Ltd. launched the first
>>> commercial IDN. It was in Taiwan and in Chinese characters under the
>>> top-level IDN TLD “.gongsi” (meaning loosely “.com”) with
>>> endorsement by the Minister of Communications of Taiwan and some
>>> major Taiwanese ISPs with reports of over 200 000 names sold in a
>>> week in Taiwan, Hong Kong, Singapore, Malaysia, China, Australia and
>>> USA.
>>> * Late 1999: Kilnam Chon initiates Task Force on IDNS which led to
>>> formation of MINC, the Multilingual Internet Names Consortium. [15]
>>> <http://www.minc.org/oldminc/old/meetings/>
>>> * 01/2000: IETF <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IETF> IDN Working
>>> Group formed chaired by James Seng
>>> <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Seng> and Marc Blanchet
>>> <http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Marc_Blanchet&action=edit>
>>> * 01/2000: The second ever commercial IDN launch was IDN TLDs in the
>>> Tamil Language, corresponding to .com, .net, .org, and .edu. These
>>> were launched in India with IT Ministry support by i-DNS.net
>>> International.
>>> * 02/2000: Multilingual Internet Names Consortium(MINC) Proposal BoF
>>> at IETF Adelaide. [16]
>>> <http://www.minc.org/oldminc/old//meetings/minc_20000327.html>
>>> * 03/2000: APRICOT 2000 Multilingual DNS session [17]
>>> <http://www.apricot.net/apricot2000/index2.html>
>>> * 04/2000: WALID Inc. (with IDNA patent pending application 6182148)
>>> started Registration & Resolving Multilingual Domain Names.
>>> * 05/2000: Interoperability Testing WG, MINC meeting. San Francisco,
>>> chaired by Bill Manning and Y.Yoneya 12 May 2000. [18]
>>> <http://www.minc.org/oldminc/old/meetings/sanfrancisco_20000512/testing_SFO.htm>
>>> * 06/2000: Inaugural Launch of the Multilingual Internet Names
>>> Consortium (MINC) in Seoul [19] <http://www.minc.org/> to drive the
>>> collaborative roll-out of IDN starting from the Asia Pacific.
>>> [20] <http://www.minc.org/about/history/>
>>> * 07/2000: Joint Engineering TaskForce (JET) initiated in Yokohama
>>> to study technical issues led by JPNIC (K.Konishi)
>>> * 07/2000: Official Formation of CDNC Chinese Domain Name Consortium
>>> to resolve issues related to and to deploy Han Character domain
>>> names, founded by CNNIC, TWNIC, HKNIC and MONIC in May 2000. [21]
>>> <http://www.cdnc.org/english/introduction/index.html> [22]
>>> <http://www.cdnc.org/english/news/index.html>
>>>
>>> * 03/01: ICANN <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ICANN> Board IDN
>>> Working Group formed
>>> * 07/01: Japanese Domain Name Association : JDNA Lauch Ceremony
>>> (July 13, 2001) in Tokyo, Japan.
>>> * 07/01: Urdu Internet Names System (July 28, 2001) in Islamabad,
>>> Pakistan, Organised Jointly by SDNP and MINC. [23]
>>> <http://urduworkshop.sdnpk.org/>
>>> * 07/01: Presentation on IDN to the Committee Meeting of the
>>> Computer Science and Telecommunications Board, National Academies
>>> USA (JULY 11-13, 2001)at University of California School of
>>> Information Management and Systems, Berkeley, CA. [24]
>>> <http://www.nap.edu/books/0309096405/html/390.html>
>>> * 08/01: MINC presentation and outreach at the Asia Pacific Advanced
>>> Network annual conference, Penang, Malaysia 20th August 2001
>>> * 10/01: Joint MINC-CDNC Meeting in Beijing 18-20 October 2001
>>> * 11/01: ICANN <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ICANN> IDN Committee formed
>>> * 12/01: Joint ITU-WIPO Symposium on Multilingual Domain Names
>>> organised in association with MINC, 6-7 Dec 2001, International
>>> Conference Center, Geneva.
>>> * 01/03: Free implementation of StringPrep, Punycode, and IDNA
>>> release in GNU Libidn.
>>>
>>> * 03/03: Publication of RFC 3454
>>> <http://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc3454>, RFC 3490
>>> <http://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc3490>, RFC 3491
>>> <http://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc3491> and RFC 3492
>>> <http://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc3492>
>>>
>>> * 06/03: Publication of ICANN IDN Guidelines for registries
>>> <http://www.icann.org/general/idn-guidelines-20jun03.htm>
>>> * 05/04: Publication of RFC 3743
>>> <http://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc3743>, Joint Engineering Team (JET)
>>> Guidelines for Internationalized Domain Names (IDN) Registration and
>>> Administration for Chinese, Japanese, and Korean
>>> * March 2005: First Study Group 17 of ITU-T meeting on
>>> Internationalized Domain Names [25]
>>> <http://www.itu.int/md/T05-SG17-050330/sum/en>
>>> * April 2006: Study Group 17 meeting in Korea gave final approval to
>>> the Question on Internationalized Domain Names [26]
>>> <http://www.itu.int/ITU-T/newslog/Multilingual+Internet+Work+Progresses.aspx>
>>> * December 2006: ICANN meeting at São Paulo discusses status of lab
>>> tests of IDNs within the root.
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>> On 5/7/2010 9:12 AM, Carlos A. Afonso wrote:
>>>
>>>> This is indeed a great milestone!
>>>>
>>>> Congrats to our Egyptian friends!
>>>>
>>>> --c.a.
>>>>
>>>> On 05/07/2010 07:21 AM, Ginger Paque wrote:
>>>>
>>>>> Congratulations to the IG workers of the world!!
>>>>>
>>>>> Copy and paste this link in your address bar ... then press enter ...
>>>>>
>>>>> وزارة-الاتصالات.مصر
>>>>>
>>>>> it is the website of MCIT Egypt with an Arabic domain name!!!
>>>>>
>>>>> Congrats MCIT, Congrats Egypt, Congrats ICANN, Congrats world!!!
>>>>>
>>>>> Best, Ginger
>>>>
>>>>
>>
>>--
>>Olivier MJ Crépin-Leblond, PhD
>>http://www.gih.com/ocl.html
>>
>>
>------------------------------------------------------------------------
>
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