Re: [idn] Requirements I-D

[Paul Hoffman / IMC <phoffman@imc.org>]

At 4:46 AM +0800 5/21/00, James Seng wrote:
>Or perhaps to be a devil advocate, why even bother with canonicalization? Why
>not let the user register X number of times.

Because we would be *forcing* name owners to register *every* logical 
combination in order prevent end users from being surprised when 
resolving names. It would be a disservice (maybe even a "failure" in 
John Klensin's vocabulary) to have an end user get to two different 
places if she enters SomeVeryLongName.com or someverylongname.com, 
particularly because there is lots of software today that will 
convert the former into the latter behind the users' back.

>(I am sure the registry and registrar would love it altho everyone else will
>feel it is a rip-off :-))))

To many of us, Internet users are much more important than name 
owners, and name owners are much more important than registries and 
their registrars. All the groups must work together, but when there 
is a choice of pain allocation to be made, we should minimize the 
pain of end users.

--Paul Hoffman, Director
--Internet Mail Consortium