Once upon a time...

[boca]

Originally Posted by Rubber Duck

That's not quite true. Domains are intellectual Property Rights and it is clear that have the rights over the Unicode which you have registered. The fact that there are proposed changes to the encodement system, which frankly aren't ever going to happen, does mean that you legal rights are in anyway negated.

Yup just because the technology was not up to snuff when you regged it does not mean you don't have the right to it. But make no mistake, fully unicode-compatible DNS will definitely happen - barring nuclear war, meteors hitting earth, etc. When and how hard to upgrade DNS? See Drewbert's excellent post. Lots of old linux servers out there that cannot simply install a new BIND. Lots of higher layers of application software that need to be rewritten too. And after everything gets done, you'll still need to wait for a global replacement cycle which will take additional years.

The idea that the Internet is this nice uniform, works-the-same-everywhere system is just quaint and sentimental. The best way to move forward in the future is to just accept the fact that the net is gonna get very fragmented. Maybe it's not a bad tradeoff if new, fancy stuff works right away on parts of the net and takes years before it works everywhere. Very hard for folks to accept, but deploying new technologies at the infrastructure level will continue to get more and more complicated. It's also essential.

[touchring]

Originally Posted by Rubber Duck

Please Mr Twomey deliver on what is required of you is several years overdue, rather than talking semantics about something which you haven't got the first clue on introducing, and for which there is no practical requirement. Implement DNAME and the job is done. If it is beyond you let Verisign sort it out!

Well, you got to give credit to Mr Twomey for his "cautiousness", otherwise, most of us here, including yourself, and newbies like me won't even got the chance to snap ourselves some fine drops from the first IDN landrush.

However he tries to drag his feet in face of "political pressure", the inevitable still comes. My suspicion is that, China has threatened to come up with it's own idn.com and idn.net if Mr Twomey does not push ahead with idns by the end of next year.

[Rubber Duck]

Is there any clear evidence that they intending to expand the existing character support within the DNS from the current 37 to something approaching 100K? Up until now all that has been discussed is the merits of including punycode strings as registry identifiers. Going from that position to a DNS that inherently recognises all the characters that any keyboard and beyond is capable of generating is an entirely different ball game.