Proposal and Some Observations on IDN

[Chun Eung Hwi]

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.


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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:   chun at peacenet.or.kr
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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.