To clarify my points on IDN, I put forward my proposal and observations. These ideas originally came from discussions within .KR ccTLD community. Nevertheless, it is not yet official position of .KR ccTLD. Still it is just my individual opinion. Its basic idea has been shown as a public comment on IDN TLD of ICANN in last February by Yangwoo Ko, my colleague, one author of RFC3743. It was the outcome of our discussion and my idea is deeply indebted to him. Here, I revised that comment only partly and complemented some additional points. His public comment is placed at the following urls. http://forum.icann.org/lists/idn-tld-comments/msg00006.html http://forum.icann.org/lists/idn-tld-comments/msg00007.html I hope this short memo could be helpful for looking at some controversial points in IDN policy discussion. I will make separate comments on Mawaki Chango's comments later. -- ------------------------------------------------------------ Chun Eung Hwi General Secretary, PeaceNet | fax: (+82) 2-2649-2624 Seoul Yangchun P.O.Box 81 | pcs: (+82) 19-259-2667 Seoul, 158-600, Korea | eMail: [log in to unmask] ------------------------------------------------------------ 1. A Proposal for IDN TLD based on language community as a separate name scheme. The ultimate goal of introducing IDNs at top level of DNS would be to allow a group of people sharing a common language script to be able to communicate with each other via names written in their own languages. Any language is being shared by those people living scattered out over the world. (Please note that the existence of a language community is not exclusively limited to one country's national territory.) In a sense, the request for IDN implies that in global internet, language community itself rather than nation state should be taken into account as more significant unit or category for its use particularly for its communication function. I believe that this perception would be more and more deeply recognized as the development and expansion of the Internet over the globe. Although it has just become some idealistic sketch for future internet due to gradually increasing government's intervention over internet, once there was some expectation or guess that ultimately the nation state's power could be weakened as much as internet would be expanded. And ICANN was regarded as one interesting experiment and response to such a change as new model of institution because it had at least nominally pursued the self regulatory principles like bottom-up consensus, open and transparent governance initiated by internet community. But I think the more fundamental change has happened in other area ? it is the emergence of language community. Internet enabled its users to communicate beyond the barrier of time and space, and also it promoted more close communication within the same language community even when its people are living scattered out on this globe. I think the need for IDN reflects this new phenomenon. Therefore, the use of IDN is not necessarily or primarily tightly coupled with any country or any group of entities such as "com"panies or "biz"nesses. In line with this thinking, I believe, in principle, IDN TLDs should be allocated to appropriate language or language script community. In considering IDN TLDs, the highest priority should be given to the goal whether it will provide a group of people sharing a common language script with a name space in which they can put their names in its native form. From a variety of proposals, I have seen that there are too many concerns to carefully avoid (or reduce) conflicts of interests among relevant entities such as existing registries. This level of concerns seems to be inevitable as long as we stick to the current categories of gTLD and ccTLD. We need to understand that IDN provides a completely new chance to review the existing name space structure. Even though IDNs are represented as (ugly looking) ASCII strings within machines and on-the-wire in a punycode encoding format, they have rich semantics when presented to end users through properly working user interfaces. It is not only possible to extend existing TLDs to translated TLDs (as is done in most proposals made so far), but also to define new category of TLDs. Language community is the most evident case of the latter. For example, we may have ".xn--oy2b11v" TLD for Korean language community. (When correctly rendered, the TLD string is read "wooree" and its meaning is "we" or "us.") There are several advantages of language community TLD compared to the existing approaches. (1) No conflicts with existing TLDs. (2) Effectively create a new name space in a completely different way from alias-based(dname) approaches. (3) Allocation/addition of new IDN TLD can be conducted mechanically without any political intervention. More concretely, each language community can be defined by reference to ISO-639 and/or ISO-639-2. (I am not so sure if this code scheme is appropriate for this purpose at the moment, but we can assume some requirements such as one relevant language community code scheme and Unicode character set for the IDN TLD allocation) And appointment of appropriate registry can apply the procedure how Unicode character set was completed. I don't have enough knowledge for that, but in that procedure, it is clear that all parties concerned with one specific character set are invited and they finally make a consensus on their own character set. These possibilities would be very helpful for avoiding the danger of politicization of this technical issue. Determination of appropriate TLD string for each language community should be based upon the consensus of the corresponding language community. (4) If necessary and appropriate, translated versions of existing TLDs can be added as second level domain under the corresponding language community TLD. Therefore, no more necessity of additional IDN gTLDs. In practice, now this policy principle is applied to ccTLDs. (5) Language community TLD would open up new possibility of the more effective use of specific language based information resources over the Internet particularly for those language community people by the help of new searching application services. Of course, this proposal doesn't exclude any possibility to add up new IDN TLD depending on ccTLDs. My point is that such a work is not pinpointing the core value of IDN and IDN TLD. And I underline that any specific country doesn't always have an absolutely exclusive rights for some specific language if some other group of people sharing the same language exist over the network and aspire to use the language script. In the registry selection process for language community TLDs, corresponding language community group must be given the most significant role. 2. New IDN TLD and the Principle of Fair Competition As far as new TLD policy is concerned, the promotion of competition in domain name market should be taken into account as one of the most important goals. Therefore, basically, any proposal that suggests "automatically" providing for additional corresponding IDN TLD operation right in the hands of existing TLD registries seems to be undesirable. Some proposals suggest using alias mechanism (i.e. DNAME) to allow existing TLD registries expand their coverage even to non-ASCII language community market. Some other proposals suggest giving one or more IDN TLDs to the existing registries not as aliases but as new TLDs. For all these proposals' own advantages, these approaches may lead to consolidating of existing TLD registries' superior status in domain name market. The fair competition principle should be applied to non sponsored and sponsored gTLDs and possibly even to ccTLDs if we assume the introduction of new additional IDN ccTLDs. Although each government could play an important role for making policies of ccTLDs and/or its translated IDN ccTLDs, it should not necessarily mean current ccTLD registry be unconditionally given the corresponding IDN ccTLD. Rather, to add up the new IDN ccTLD should be encouraged for making more competitive registry market. Also, as RFC 1591 clarified, the selection process of IDN ccTLD must be based upon the consensus of the corresponding local Internet community. 3. IDN ccTLD Proposal as a compromise The idea that new IDN TLD should be based on language community seems be very abstract in many respects because it must be not easy for a specific language community to reach some consensus for making one application for their own IDN TLD. And in the absence of any decision-making mechanism of language community, it seems to be very hypothetical. However, I think, although it is not easy but not completely impossible. In the case of Chinese IDN TLD, there could be mostly some consensus that China should play a leading role within Chinese language community. And even in Arab league, they seem to be easily able to coordinate working for Arab language IDN TLD. In Korean peninsula, north and south can easily coordinate to create one Korean language IDN TLD and moreover, this could be a good momentum to build mutual confidence of both sides. Therefore, if we can have such a policy that new IDN TLD can be allocated by the request of each language community and only one IDN TLD is to be allocated for one specific language community, we can gradually increase the number of IDN TLD. If there are some language communities which are ready to apply, they could get it, but if not, it should take time. Another option is to allocate tanslated ccTLDs in the language script that corresponding ccTLD registry suggests as a translation of just their country name other than any other things. This is Chinese proposal. But in my view, this proposal seems to be not so good. And its weak principle consequently invited gTLD registry's intervention. Then, if we accept the idea that only country name IDN TLDs would be added in advance because of its urgent need and all other IDN TLDs will be allocated only by language community ? therefore it means that there is no more IDN TLDs ? I think that proposal could be taken into account as one compromise. In my view, the demand for IDN.IDN is not the demand for new additional TLD to the existing TLDs, but for non-ASCII TLD dimensionally different from the existing ASCII domain name scheme. That's why even in its initial stage, Asian IDN experiments have been undertaken largely in a form of IDN.IDN, but not IDN.ASCII. Because its original demand was to avoid to use ASCII character set in domain name label for those people who are using non-Latin languages. As you know, more and more ccTLDs are allowing user's domain name registration at the second level name space except for some countries like .uk, .au, .kr and etc. In those cases, all commercial entities are registered at the second level, next to their country code without any suffix of com or com-equivalent suffix. It shows us well why com-equivalent IDN TLD is not necessarily required. Because ccTLD's market value is different from gTLD market value. They are independent or complementary. Differently from general reasoning that ccTLD would compete with gTLD in the same market, statistics shows up that their relationship turns out to be in parallel. As much as the number of ccTLD registrants increase, the number of those gTLD registrants of that country tends to be also almost proportionally increasing. As such, I think, IDN TLD would have a separate differentiated market value even when it is not com-equivalent IDN TLD.