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View Full Version : PAUL TWOMEY: WHEN not IF!


Rubber Duck
28th March 2007, 01:09 PM
At an ICANN as a whole perspective on IDNs, there are several things we think are important. First of all, you will find that ICANN -- we are not having a discussion about if. We are having a discussion about when, okay? If you follow closely this topic over the last years, particularly in some of the technical communities, there have definitely been people who have had more heavy conversation about "if." So, first of all, the ICANN discussion is about "when." The second part of that is that there are -- as Tina reported yesterday, there are a series of dependencies that presently faces ICANN to get the work that we've outlined finished. Those dependencies are work undertaken by the IETF and its interplay with the Unicode consortium.

Further, there's a review to be done by the Security and Stability Advisory Committee. There will be a -- before anything is put in the root, the USG, I expect, will want -- United States Government, the Department of Commerce will want to assure there has been a security check and they have already indicated that from their perspective, which is completely sensible.

And the other dependencies, the work being done by the generic Name Supporting Organization and your own organization about the policy implications that are around the introductions. I don't think personally there is any reason why we can't have some sort of tiered introduction to IDNs, but not all these levers are in our hands. I am interested to hear your issues on the CCs. Perhaps it is worth it.

I will make this observation. From my sins and doing a lot of travel as president of ICANN and invariably when I have a conversation about IDNs in a country essentially what I am really hearing it, please, I want to use my character set on my networks, okay?

Now, that's obvious and fine, but unfortunately that's not the ICANN mandate. We actually have to worry about a single global interpretable Internet which does mean we have to worry about all character sets or languages, if I can use loose language.

And we have to worry about it working on all networks. And that is causing some delay. I know that causes some frustration for people. I understand the push at the local level, please give me my local language and my local -- so I can use my local networks.

But if we are going to have a single interpretable Internet, we actually have to take a little bit more time to ensure that we get a nice solution.

http://icann.org/meetings/lisbon/transcript-ccnso-members-27mar07.htm