RE: [idn] NSI Multilingual Testbed Information (fwd)

[bill@mail.nic.nu (J. William Semich)]

AFAIK, RACE is not a "proposed standard." And, as I mentioned in Pittsburgh
as well as on this list, some parts of RACE may be covered by a patent
granted to someone who is not even participating in this working group, and
thus has no interest in intellectual property disclosures required under
RFC 2206. Has NSI contacted the holder of this patent prior to using it for
a commercial (albeit "testbed") implementation?

Not to belabor the issue, but UTF-8 is an *approved* standard under RFC 2277.

Finally, as I read the press release you put out about this at:

http://biz.yahoo.com/bw/000822/va_network.html 

as well as your Web page explanation to registrars, at:

http://www.nsiregistry.com/multilingual/multilingual.html

it is clear that, come October, NSI will be accepting and publishing on the
Internet fully functional IDN
domain names:
 
                       "The NSI Registry testbed will use a multilingual
domain name server that
                       provides hostname-to-address DNS service and
delegation of multilingual
                       sub domains. Conforming to existing NSI Registry
standards for gTLD
                       name servers, this server-side implementation
results in minimal impact
                       to existing applications and resolvers. NSI
Registry's goal is that any
                       multilingual domain name solution should work with a
number of
                       standards-based encoding schemes (e.g. RACE, UTF-8)
deployed at the
                       client and resolver levels.

                       NSI Registry will implement multilingual domain
names in the .com, .net,
                       and .org gTLDs in the following format:

                            <multilingual domain name>.com
                            <multilingual domain name>.net
                            <multilingual domain name>.org

                       The testbed will be operative for managing
authoritative name server (NS)
                       records, IPv4 address (A) records, and a zone's
start of authority (SOA)
                       information record."

In effect, the NSI Testbed server is a "launch" of multilingual domain name
services to any customer of any participating .com, .net and .org ICANN
Certified Registrar who also meets your multilingual certifications
standards, correct?

FYI, .NU Domain has decided to hold back on launching a commercial
multilingual domain name service using NUBIND until IETF standards are
pinned down - even though we have had the technology up and running for the
past 9 months. I explained why in Pittsburgh.

But if .com, .net and .org multilingual names will be available in October,
obviously, from a competitive point of view, .NU Domain (as well as any
other ccTLD with the technology) will be reconsidering that approach.

Bill Semich

.NU

At 07:11 AM 8/25/00 -0400, Hollenbeck, Scott wrote:
>If building a test bed to start getting real-world experience with
>technologies proposed in this WG is out of line, we're guilty.  Sadly, the
>message Rick paraphrased left out technical detail that the members of this
>mailing list were bound to see as significant omissions that obviously have
>people misunderstanding our intentions.  For example, the "certification"
>process is intended to ensure that a registrar's client software is capable
>of doing accurate RACE encoding for a list of known IDN labels as part of
>the domain name registration process.
>
>We fully intend to keep the test bed in synch with this group's efforts.  If
>something other than RACE encoding is what eventually becomes a proposed
>standard, we'll change the test bed to keep up.  Truth is, we think it's
>important to this group's efforts to understand how well the technologies
>we're discussing will work in the real world, and that's what we're trying
>to get ahead of.
>
>Scott Hollenbeck
>Network Solutions, Inc. Registry
>
>-----Original Message-----
>From: Keith Moore [mailto:moore@cs.utk.edu]
>Sent: Thursday, August 24, 2000 9:41 PM
>To: Rick H Wesson
>Cc: idn@ops.ietf.org
>Subject: Re: [idn] NSI Multilingual Testbed Information (fwd) 
>
>
>is it just me, or does anybody else get the impression that NSI is 
>way, way, way out of line here?
>
>Keith
>
>