These are important questions, but posing those questions requires, I think somewhat more debate.

Why?  I'll confess this is my washington policy sensibility clicking.  This consticuency seeks to provide a voice for non-commercial organizations within the ICANN process, which includes on issues of registry opperation.  It is a no brainer to ask how the non-commercial registrants, which this consticuency is designed to represent, will be protected.

It is somewhat more challenging to send a letter inquirying about policy, because then the wording becomes very important and may require extensive debate.  By contrast, a simple inquiry about the welfare of non-commercial registrants should be both simple to execute and relatively non-controversial.

Harold

Marc Schneiders wrote:
[log in to unmask]"> 
As a non-native speaker of English I may say things too strongly... In
any case, I would like the letter you suggest also to include a
request for clarification about why PIR is doing away with IDN names
in .ORG and why in such a secret way, both in March 2003, when
resolution suddenly stopped and now again, esp. since so far PIR has
promised to let these domains hibernate until some final encoding for
IDNs is approved.

On Thu, 8 Jan 2004, at 10:16 [=GMT-0500], Harold Feld wrote:

It seems to me that perhaps it is appropriate for the executive
committee of the consticuency to send a polite letter of inquiry from
the consticuency to PIR asking if the notification is correct and, if
so, what steps will be taken to inform and mitigate hardship to the
non-commercial user who registered for these names in good faith.

Harold Feld

Marc Schneiders wrote:

Perhaps more than a footnote to the present discussion of "Approval
process for gtld service changes": PIR is going to delete all
multilingual domains (also called IDN) on February 2004. I learned
about this through the newsletter of a German registrar (quote below).

I have protested earlier about the silent end to resolution (working
DNS) of these domains in March 2003. PIR was not very responsive, to
put it mildly. Now again there will be a secret change to these
domains. They will quietly disappear. I see no message about it on the
PIR website.

I am of the opinion that this is unacceptable in several respects:

1. Registrants are not notified. I have such a domain and I heard
nothing.

2. It is done in a most intransparent, even secret manner.

3. It is related to the redelegation of a TLD. Will the same thing
happen in 2005 with .NET?

4. Multilingual domains were a private initiative of
Verisign, not
approved by ICANN, but neither did ICANN tell Verisign not to do it.
In this context it is most relevant for the "approval process" topic.

5. PIR kills .ORG multilinguals for technical reasons, it says (well
the German text below does). At the same time Afilias (which runs .ORG
technically) is introducing multilingual .INFO domains. Can anyone
explain this to me, please?

>From newsletter of dd24.net:

----------------------------------------------------------------------------
PIR wird multilinguale .ORG Domains nun doch löschen
----------------------------------------------------------------------------

Nach einer anders lautenden Meldung im November hat uns das kürzlich
ernannte Zentralregister für .ORG Domains, Public Interest Registry
(PIR),
jetzt darüber informiert, dass die Registrierungen der nach dem
ehemaligen
"RACE-Verfahren" eingetragenen multilingualen .ORG Domains
(also
Domains mit
Umlauten bzw. Sonderzeichen) doch nicht länger kostenlos verlängert
werden.
Stattdessen hat sich PIR für eine Löschung aller multilingualen .ORG
Domains
zum 1. Februar 2004 entschieden.

Gründe für diese Entscheidung sind insbesondere die technischen
Schwierigkeiten und Unsicherheiten der zukünftigen Umwandlung der
bereits
registrierten Domains in das neue "Punycode-Verfahren".

Nun muss zunächst einmal geklärt werden, auf welche Weise eine
Neueinführung
multilingualer .ORG Domains gemäß des allgemeinen Standarts zukünftig
überhaupt durchgeführt werden soll. Wir sind gespannt...

Quelle: PIR