Welcome Tina

[haomi]

Welcome, Tina.

[Rubber Duck]

Tina, I would implore you to consider the economic impact that these delays are having on Asian economies and try to communicate that fact to the representatives that probably don't really understand this. Delays mean lost potential human development. To understand this you only need to look at Japan, where the use of the Address bar in the browser is little understood. Japanese use search mainly Yahoo and then Bookmark. The dysfunctionalism is extremely costly.

Secondly, I would also like to make the point that is not such important that we arrive tomorrow, but that we all have some idea of where we are going. Most internet users Worldwide relate strongly to dot com. They need to know what is happening in terms of representing dot com in the Root, and how that is going to affect their investment in their own Intellectual Property Rights, which is largely a separate issue than those of Verisign. Investment is about confidence. People need a clear road map to work to.

Much more pressure needs to be exerted on Browser publishers. Browser support is still actually a much bigger issue than even putting IDN.IDN into the Root. Mozilla for a start needs to be told that they are not the one chartered to determine policy and that Verisign is responsible to ICANN and not Mozilla. At the same time clarity is required on what is going to happen to the legacy domains that Verisign has registered in mixed scripts, symbols and dingbats. If these domains are going to be useless or deleted people need to understand how they are going to be affected. If you can sort out this issue then the problem of Mozilla not White Listing dot com should go away. Verisign is not going to take a lead here. It really isn't their position to do so.

On the communication front, you have done a great job in recent week getting Mr Twomney on message. Keep up the good work. As far as press releases are concerned, it is extremely important to get the kind of syndication going on in the English speaking World to happen in Japanese, Arabic, Russian and Hindi, as well as perhaps some European languages. The Chinese are very good at translating it themselves and doing their own syndication, but for the others press releases in the their own languages to major mouth pieces should be an important goal.

[Olney]

Also Tina
The members here are multinationals from around the globe, with a vast majority in Asia. Any answers provided by you will end up translated & posted in various global domain forums. You may experience repeat questions by those who of course have concerns that might affect the market they invest, develop for or reside in.

[rhys]

And in case, no one mentioned it before, we all agree that you are as of this moment our forum's best looking member! Welcome we appreciate you being here.

[jacksonm]

Greetings, Tina.

It's very nice to see you coming here to answer our questions and discuss the current state of affairs in the IDN scene. I assume that you are pretty busy with your work, but it would be really fine if you could find time to pop in every now and then and say hey.

One of the burning issues on my mind is that why is Verisign permitted to avoid publishing and enforcing an IDN policy which prohibits registration of unnaturally mixed-script domains? One of the key arguments against IDNs, as I am sure that you are aware of, is that they allow spoofing of existing .com domains - the issue is strongest with cyrillic and greek letters which resemble ascii letters. As I understand the situation, if ICANN allows a registry to offer IDNs then that registry must publish a policy such as this for registrars to follow. As a result of Verisign's refusal to stop registration of mixed-script spoofing/phishing domains, Mozilla has taken a vigilante approach to security and implemented a whitelisting mechanism into their Firefox browser, whereby only those registries which disallow registration of phishing domains are whitelisted and display unicode in the address bar - all others (.com, .net) will display punycode in the address bar.

Could you please give your thoughts about this situation?

.

[bramiozo]

Welcome to our underground lair Tina .

What is the movement in the IDNA-protocol development, will there be a new release anytime soon? At domain pulse 2007 you mentioned that the revised protocol might cause incompatibility of the present IDN.gtld's, does this still apply ?

http://www.ispam.nl/archives/536/ver...serland-dag-2/

A bit on the policy though, IDN's in the second level have been out of the testphase for several years yet a changed IDNA-protocol might still nullify the rights of all present idn-owners, don't you think currrent ctld's will obstruct any such action even before the registrants start a lawsuit?
Think of .kr and .de (.ch,.at), there is little chance these registries will clean the zonefiles for idn just because someone at ICANN got the idea to, as a figure of speech, shift a view spaces and dots in the IDNA-protocol.

You want to seperate your technical activities from the policy-side but it's too late for that, IDN and the current IDNA-protocol are now intertwined with the rights of hundreds of thousands of registrants. You cannot (as an engineer) devise a technology which forces a policy change which affects hundreds of thousands of legal subjects and at the same time deny responsibility for any damages. I sincerely hope that the technical evaluations are combined with some ethical discussions.

[alpha]

Originally Posted by TinaDam

.... The best guesses however are that thids PDP will take between 2-7 years ...
Tina

$even Year$ ! LMAO

With a similar sized budget how come NASA can design, build, test and launch a Mars landing mission in the same time frame.

Seriously - Someones head needs to roll.

[bwhhisc]

Originally Posted by TinaDam

Thank you for the warm welcome and all the questions. I don't mean this the wrong way as it certainly is staff responsibility to be responsive to the community, but I did not know about the forum before. All my contact details are available online and so in return i wish soemone from the forum had contacted me earlier....with 24 hours in a day its impossible to notice all forums and blogs and everything. So let's just say its better late than never.

No doubt our group here could probably keep you busy full time answering our questions! You insights and answers
are certainly appreciated and we are glad to have a bit of a conduit up to ICANN about our concerns. I guess if I had
one wish it would be to get the words out that "IDNs are here, and thousands of IDN sites are live today".

Most domainers have NO IDEA how large the foreign language internet is, and how many websites and pages there are.
My guess is they will soon collectively exceed the English language pages, but who knows. Are there any statistics for this?

Some of the members here speak limited English, and Olney is right that your comments will span from here to the
Chinese, Japanese, and Russian domains forums very quickly. Just a quick check at the Chinese idnclub.com has
your name and some translations of information appearing on page 1 already.

http://www.idnclub.com/

[Edwin]

Tina, welcome...

This has already been addressed in this thread to an extent, but definitely bears repeating:-

IDN.com domains work right now today just fine (the search engines will index them, all latest-version browsers will resolve them albeit perhaps with a few weirdnesses on the display front)

Likewise, IDN.cctld domains work right now today just fine (for CCTLD registries that have implemented IDNs)

Regardless of IDN.IDN's timetable, status, stability, desirability, ultimate implementation policy etc. it is VITAL - I repeat VITAL - to ensure that the message gets through that there's no need to wait for an indefinite, uncertain IDN.IDN future to use IDN domains - they work right now!

The fact that the postfix is an ASCII string (.com, .cctld) is a hair that doesn't need to be split since right now folks in non-English locales are able to resolve and type all-ASCII domains anyway, so they can certainly cope with domains that are IDN.ASCII.

But to date all ICANN communications that I've seen on the subject of IDNs have either ignored or brushed aside the reality that there are hundreds of thousands of IDNs already registered, already working and already usable... and no practical reasons other than widespread dissemination of their existence why those hundreds of thousands couldn't be hundreds of millions.

To draw a motor industry parallel, IDN.IDN might be the diesel engine of the car world. Cars already exist and run just fine on gasoline (IDN.ASCII) but the main automotive oversight body (= ICANN) is still talking about carriages and horses and is suggesting that only diesel cars are, in fact, cars at all!

In other words, please could you endeavour to spread the word internally - and externally - that the "IDN" situation being discussed by ICANN is a very specific, specialized subset of "all IDNs", that is, the subset of IDNs where the postfix is also an IDN? This has never been made clear, and it's a distinction that I don't think many ICANN folks are even considering...

Failure to slay this misconception is likely to set back the process of IDN adoption far more than delays or confusion about IDN.IDN allocation/distribution ever will!

[domainguru]

Welcome to you Tina,

I can only reiterate what Edwin said. Please don't focus entirely on IDN.IDN as though IDN.com doesn't exist, or is part of a "test".

I own a Thai site using an IDN.com domain name which currently gets up to 10,000 daily visitors, but when I try and look for local sponsors and advertisers, it is very difficult, partly because nobody in Thailand knows that IDN.com are here and working.

Sure, talk about the IDN.IDN "future", but also please spread the message that IDNs are alive and kicking now, not just "something for the future".

Thanks for listening!

[burnsinternet]

Ms. Dam,

We all appreciate what you do. You have become rather famous around here. We all look forward to the day when IDNs are just known as 'domains' by the general public.

Currently, we all receive 'traffic' to our IDN domains. Some domains get an enormous amount of traffic. German .de IDN domains are the obvious winners. In my experience, Latin domains (Swedish, Spanish, French, etc.) and Cyrillic domains (Russian, Ukrainian, etc.) get the most traffic. You are not fighting an uphill battle. I hope this encourages you to keep fighting.

We understand, in some ways, the difficulties you face. I hope you are not treated the same way we are treated when mentioning IDNs. Many people out there are obstinate. Don't let it get you down.

I do have some questions - unrelated to IDN policy.... Where are you from and how did you become interested in this subject? Also, how do you keep yourself excited about your job in the face of so many obstacles?

Happy to have you here.

Thanks,

Jerry

[touchring]

Ok, so.... when can we expect a decision to be made for alias or ns or dname?

Many of us are just waiting for this piece of news, having given up on IE7 auto upgrade to happen anytime soon.
auto

:^)

[Rubber Duck]

Decisions get made at Board meetings which happen at summits, and are generally derived from the output of the scheduled meetings. As Tina has indicated many times, staff members are just not empowered to make the decision that many of you would like.

I think we can expect some progress at Los Angeles (probably mostly in relation to ccTLD policy), but things definitely need to crystalize in Delhi. I think this is an excellent venue for the Spring Meeting, and should help to put some real focus on matters.

[domainstosell]

Welcome Tina.

I don't mean to "pile on" as it were, but I think the importance of both Edwin's and Rubber Duck's earlier posts need to be stressed again:

As Edwin said, IDN.com are currently a reality, and there needs to be more of an educational emphasis on this fact. For ICANN to come out and say "yes, these are out here, and they work" would lend a considerable amount of credibility to this fact, and many of the misconceptions in the general media (the glurge and misinformation due to lack of research) could be corrected.

Combining this with RD's point about the need for translated press releases to reach and educate non-English speakers would go a long way toward the education and acceptance of IDNs that we are all looking for, both as investors and webmasters as well as from ICANN's point of view. I understand that there are only so many hours in the day, and I also recognize the potential expense involved with that kind of PR undertaking, but even making sure to include the international markets in the release distribution and allowing (encouraging) them to do their own translations would be a step in the right direction.

Aside from that, though, keep up the great work - we are making headway, and it's an exciting time to be involved with IDNs.

[seesawgame]

Welcome to TAIWAN this Saturday

Wesker HU

[Explorer]

Originally Posted by TinaDam

The information relating to mid 2008 is related to the fact that the process for introduction of new gTLDs currently is expected to be available by mid 2008. Now, the technical part needs to be ready as well in order for this process to include "IDN gTLDs". We can't say for sure until we have more results from the tests related to the IDN TLDs that are currently in the root, but that is the goal.

On the cc-front, the ccNSO and the GAC have requested an issues report for IDN policy issues. After the issues report they may vote to start the formal Policy Development (PDP). The best guesses however are that thids PDP will take between 2-7 years - and since a greater need has been expressed the ccNSo and teh GAC are currently discussing whether they can launch a faster process than the PDP and run the two in parallel with the faster process introducing a limited number of "IDN ccTLDs". I think these two groups will have more information by the ICANN LA meeting later this month.

Tina

Hi Tina, welcome and thank you for answering our questions!


So, IDN gTLDs could be ready and available earlier than IDN ccTLDs by several years? Am I reading this correctly?

[burnsinternet]

Originally Posted by TinaDam

If you want normal use of IDNs then help us define what 'normal' is and go to that evaluation forum that is set up to cover user experience and expectations. That is, http://idn.icann.org

Guys & Gals! Go to the various discussion sites and ask your questions. The discussion pages are interesting now, but everyone could benefit from discussion on that page. If we want to do our part, we need to use that site. Those new to IDNs are not going to magically find this forum. Please, guys. Help out by posting in the various language areas.

[Drewbert]

>Let me try to make this clear. ICANN staff does not make policy decisions.

Unless it involves the .xxx gTLD, of course

[Rubber Duck]

Originally Posted by Drewbert

>Let me try to make this clear. ICANN staff does not make policy decisions.

Unless it involves the .xxx gTLD, of course

Even there, I think you need to understand the distinction between Staff and Board Members!

[ala101]

Welcome Tina!