[ga] Who'se done it? .org IDNs killed

[Marc Schneiders <marc@fuchsia.bijt.net>]

On Fri, 20 Jun 2003, at 11:54 [=GMT-0700], George Kirikos wrote:

> http://www.icann.org/announcements/announcement-20jun03.htm

Great news. On a practical level matters are less great. .org IDNs have
ceased to work months ago, I think. In any case they do not work now. The
whole zone (mltbd.org) is dead. The .com and .net still do fine. Who
pulled the plug? VeriSign? PIR, some clueless sys admin? The domain
mltbd.org (which as said serves for the .org IDNs) is registered to
Beckwith of PIR. The nameservers, however, seem to be VeriSign's.

I contacted PIR about this, did get replies, but none that explained. They
are now investigating for over two weeks and getting back to me for over a
week. So maybe some public pressure is in order. Sorry about that. I don't
accept being left in the blue for long.

Facts I have:

1. My weblogs tell me that mid March requests for .org IDNs still came in.
Those are the last ones. It was working then. After that it must have
died. So initially PIR held on to their promise that the existing .org
IDNs would continue to function. (New ones were not possible anymore after
January 1, 2003.) Now they don't work anymore and PIR doesn't do a thing
about it even after they have been told. It cannot be hard to reinstate
the zone if it was accidently dropped. Doesn't have to take weeks, does
it? So much for stability, stability, stability.

2. The zone for the 'testbed' IDN .org domains (mltbd.org) has nameservers
in the parent zone. These nameservers do not know anything about the zone
now (and didn't when I looked into it two wweks ago and contacted PIR).

One wonders why nobody but me seems to have noticed this. Or did I miss
something?

To be clear: I am talking about DNS, not whois details. These are still in
place.

If this message sounds sour, I am. Even though PIR doesn't charge at the
moment for IDNs in .org, they shouldn't just let them die contrary to
their promises, and without telling those who have these domains.

-- 
[03] I thank you for your time and interest.
http://logoff.org/


--
This message was passed to you via the ga@dnso.org list.
Send mail to majordomo@dnso.org to unsubscribe
("unsubscribe ga" in the body of the message).
Archives at http://www.dnso.org/archives.html