Re: [idn] I-D ACTION:draft-ietf-idn-cjk-00.txt

[Keith Moore <moore@cs.utk.edu>]

> ** And the other answer is legal. What is driving the rush to
> IDNS is laws in some jurisdictions (including the US) which
> require a trademark owner to attempt to register it as a domain
> name or lose it. Too restrictive a design risks being ignored
> in favour of something proprietary.

I think you are exaggerating here.  folks who don't defend 
use of their trademarks as domains might lose the ability
to stake a claim on those domains, but this is the first I've
heard of the actual trademark being threatened.  for that to 
happen the domain should have to be identical, or nearly so,
to the trademark itself.  

of course, courts and legislative bodies have been known to 
do stupid things, especially where intellectual property 
is concerned.  but our job as engineers is to make sure that
things work well technically.  we should not cater to the 
stupidity of courts or legislative bodies,  especially when 
doing so compromises engineering sanity.  there is at least
a chance that the law will become more sensible over time.
but any brain damage we build into IDN will be difficult 
to get rid of.

DNS exists primarily to map names of hosts and services and 
locations on the network onto attributes of those hosts and 
services and locations.  It does not exist to represent
dog names, nor even trademarks.  Of course, people might want
to name a host after a dog, or vice versa, and it's nice if
DNS can accomodate them.  But the fact that a dog name
or trademark might happen to be similar to a DNS name is
not something for engineers to be concerned with, nor should
DNS be expected to hold all possible dog names or trademarks.

Keith

p.s. in fact, my workstation *is* named after a dog.  but I wouldn't
insist that DNS provide me with the ability to do so.

p.p.s. none of the above is meant to apply in the slighest
to language tagging or z-variants.