[council] Question to VeriSign re IDN deployment in the Root

[Elisabeth Porteneuve <Elisabeth.Porteneuve@cetp.ipsl.fr>]

Roger,

Would you clarify the following (see 5) VeriSign announcement 
concerning IDN names ?

VeriSign indicates that they will be putting ML (multi-lingual) names 
in the Root on the 27th October before the IETF has concluded its work.

The IETF IDN engineers determined twelve items to be defined on 
technical level before the ML domain names could be used with the 
Internet's existing end-to-end model and that preserve globally 
unique naming in a universally resolvable public name space. 
Whereas the first issue on encoding scheme (see 1) had only just been 
published as draft version, there are still many others awaiting 
technical developments. 
At an application level these active ML names have no chance 
of functioning, causing confusion and damaging the cultural 
aspects of ML domain names.

Elisabeth
--

References:

1. The IETF published on 4 Sep 2001 an Internet Draft (expiring 4 Mar 2002)
   http://www.ietf.org/internet-drafts/draft-ietf-idn-amc-ace-z-01.txt

2. The IDN testbed authorization under .com given to VeriSign in 
   http://www.icann.org/minutes/minutes-25sep00.htm (... constructive 
   experimentation with extensions to the domain name system to support 
   multilingual names should be encouraged, provided it is done in a 
   manner consistent with promoting responsible standardization, it avoids 
   disrupting the stability of the Internet or the interoperability of 
   Internet services, and its experimental character is clearly 
   understood by all affected)

3. The NC resolution (Decision D2) in Stockholm
   http://www.dnso.org/dnso/notes/20010602.NCstockholm-minutes.html

4. The ML implications on the stability of the Internet or the 
   interoperability of Internet services became of utmost importance 
   to all stakeholders, including governments and the ICANN Board, 
   as shown in Montevideo resolutions 01.94 to 01.100, establishing 
   an IDN Committee as part of ICANN Corporation. Chaired by 
   Director Masanobu Katoh.
   http://www.icann.org/minutes/prelim-report-10sep01.htm

5. VeriSign announcement to convert its current RICE encoding 
   used at the testbed to AMC-ACE-Z, with deployment of zone 
   files from October 27th, 2001 through November 12th, 2001, 
   and making the testbed domain names active
   cf: http://www.dnso.org/clubpublic/registrars/Arc01/msg01279.html

-------Start of Quoted VeriSign ML announcement---------
---------- Forwarded message ----------
Date: Fri, 28 Sep 2001 14:10:00 -0400
From: VeriSign Global Registry Services <info@verisign-grs.com>
To: idntestbed@verisign-grs.com
Subject: [IDNList] Registrar Advisory: AMC-ACE- Z in the zones

To All IDN-Certified Registrars:

VeriSign Global Registry Services (GRS) intends to move forward in the
Internationalized Domain Name Testbed by placing the IDNs directly into
the .com, .net and .org zones.  The zones will be populated with the
AMC-ACE-Z v0.3.1 representation of the IDNs.  Registrars do not need to
modify any of their current registration processes to support this change.  
All existing IDNs originally registered with RACE will be valid under the
AMC-ACE-Z encoding.

Deployment will occur from October 27th, 2001 through November 12th,
2001. On October 27th, all existing registrations will have their associated
AMC-ACE-Z representation calculated and stored in the database along
with the current RACE representation.  The registration process will not
change:
all new registrations will still be received in RACE, but will now have
the AMC-ACE-Z component calculated and stored in the database.  Reports
will be available on a monthly basis showing a registrar's IDN registrations
in both RACE and AMC-ACE-Z representations. These reports will be posted 
to the Registrar FTP site.

Because this deployment will require a modification to the zone
generation process, there will be a two-week parallel operation period to
ensure that the zone files generated under the new process are equivalent 
to the files generated by the old zone process.

Upon completion of the parallel operation period, approximately
November 12th, 2001, VeriSign GRS will take all IDN registrations off of
Registry-Hold status and place them on Active status, which allows the
IDNs to be selected by the zone generation process.  This change from
Registry-Hold to Active status will be a background process and will
not require an outage of the SRS, though it will require a few days to
change all IDNs to Active status.  In addition, all new IDN registrations as
of that date will be placed on Active status.

The next step in the testbed will be the migration of all IDN-certified
Registrars to the new ACE standard for registration.  We do not
anticipate beginning this process until there is an RFC from the IETF
pertaining
to an ACE.  More information will be provided as it becomes available.  All
registrars will have ample time to prepare for this migration.

If you require additional information, please contact Customer Service
at info@verisign-grs.com.

Best Regards,

Chris Sheridan
Manager, Customer Service
VeriSign Global Registry Services
www.verisign-grs.com
info@verisign-grs.com
Customer Service
-------End of Quoted VeriSign ML announcement---------