Re: China

[Fred Baker <chair@ietf.org>]

Hello there. I want to drop a note to encourage you in your efforts to
enhance the DNS to support international character sets. My sense is that
the right set of things are happening, and recent events in business tell
us that we need to make them happen with some alacrity. My sense is also
that a word on the goals and objectives might help sharpen the focus.

Let me set before you a viewpoint and some goals that I would like you to
achieve, if you please.

 - I think, first, that the selection of character set is a no brainer. 
   There are defined character sets, and we know how to put them into DNS. 
   The thing to do is follow the same procedures and rules we have used in 
   extending other protocols that use alphabetic information - some 
   combination of ISO 10646 enhanced by UNICODE rules. I would encourage 
   you to settle that debate quickly and move on. This is the easy part.

 - Although DNS is defined as a binary service (and therefore amenable to 
   changes such as the use of UTF-8), many implementations are dependent 
   on the specific character set used by UTF-5. Therefore, deployment of a 
   UTF-8-based solution implies a need for extensive testing of 
   implementations to make sure that they accomplish the necessary goals.

 - There are significant questions in the comparison of characters. For 
   example, in European alphabets, upper and lower case are considered 
   equivalent - "Cisco.com" and "cisco.com" are the same DNS name. In 
   German, a "u" with an umlaut over it is equivalent to a "u" followed by 
   an umlaut extender, and also to the character string "ue". No doubt it 
   only gets more interesting as you move to ideographic alphabets.

 - There are key operational issues in balkanizing the Internet along name 
   domain basis. Besides the intellectual property questions, there are 
   fundamental questions along the lines of "what did you think you were 
   achieving when you connected?" Certainly gaining access to others who 
   are using names represented in your particular language and character 
   set are interesting, but getting to others is interesting as well. 
   Dividing the root makes this break down in one direction or the other.
   Would, for example, people in Taiwan prefer to be able to use Chinese
   characters to name and talk with each other at the cost of no longer
   being able to access or be accessible from US markets, or would it be 
   better to do both?

 - Fundamentally, this is why we have a standards process. You want to 
   make a service that works for all players and then deploy it, rather 
   than deploy a service that is mutually non-interoperable and therefore 
   of limited service to your clients.

I appreciate that I am preaching to the choir. My point is: OK, choir, you
need to produce a result that solves these problems and is operationally
useful, and do so expeditiously. So I would suggest that you avoid
rat-holes where you can to proceed, with all due speed and no haste, to a
workable solution. 
=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=
Fred Baker	| 519 Lado Drive
IETF Chair	| Santa Barbara California 93111
www.ietf.org	| Desk:   +1-408-526-4257
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