[governance] Friday morning... (Arabic Domain Name) Some
Ian Peter
ian.peter at ianpeter.com
Fri May 7 17:37:39 EDT 2010
Thanks Subbiah for this update and part of history. I recall Vint Cerf at
ICANN 2001 in Melbourne saying, as ICANN Chair, "English is the lingua
franca of the Internet" And I recall many people lining up to speak at the
public microphone at the board meeting, in some sort of protest, in any
language other than English while a bemused board looked on.
Internet governance moves in slow and mysterious ways! But yes, it is good
that we finally got there "officially" even if for many we got there a long
time ago.
Ian Peter
> From: "S. Subbiah" <subbiah at i-dns.net>
> Reply-To: <governance at lists.cpsr.org>, "S. Subbiah" <subbiah at i-dns.net>
> Date: Fri, 07 May 2010 11:12:13 -0700
> To: <governance at lists.cpsr.org>, Ginger Paque <gpaque at gmail.com>
> Subject: Re: [governance] Friday morning... (Arabic Domain Name) Some
> Background
>
>
> 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-domai
>>>> n-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-i18
>>>> n-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/refer
>>>> ence/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.asp
>>>> x>
>>>> * 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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