Re: [idn] Chinese Domain Name Consortium (CDNC) Declaration

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

The message from CDNC says that the Traditional-Simplified problem 
for Chinese users cannot be solved by registration policy. This is 
not true, and many of the CDNC members who have come to IETF meetings 
know that. Of course, CDNC members would like to maximize their 
financial gain in registration, but the concern of the IETF is always 
towards helping users. There is a huge different between "cannot be 
solved" and "it will cost a small number of organizations a lot of 
money".

Solving the Traditional-Simplified problem in the IDN protocol would 
have given more uniform results for users. The intense discussions 
over the past 18 months have shown that not only is it unlikely that 
there will ever be an IETF-based solution, and it has also become 
clear that a registration-based solution will likely give Chinese 
users more sensible naming that anything than the IETF could 
standardize. For example, in the IDN WG, the proposals from CDNC 
members only addressed part of the Traditional-Simplified problem 
(the 1:1 mapping), while the registration solution can address all of 
the problem in a manner that will help Chinese users.

Due to the efforts of some CDNC members, the IETF is now well aware 
of the "2^n" variant problem that is unique to the use of Han 
characters in the Chinese language. Fortunately, using registration 
guidelines will solve the problem. The only people seriously affected 
by the size of DNS zones created by the "2^n" problem will be very 
large, flat zones such as those managed by CDNC members, but they are 
able to compensate for the size of zones with no changes to the DNS 
protocols.

Of course, the character variant problem exists in many different 
languages, not just in Chinese. Because of this, each registry or 
zone that includes IDN names needs to make decisions about name 
equivalence (and therefore multiple registrations) before they enter 
any IDN names into their zone. Based on this input during Working 
Group last call from the CDNC, it seems clear that we need to explain 
these points more in the IDNA document.

--Paul Hoffman, Director
--Internet Mail Consortium