RIPE NCC Responds to ICANN CEO's Proposal

An anonymous reader sends in: "RIPE NCC (the European IP address registry) responds to the ICANN proposals for reducing their own accountability even further whilst spending millions of everyone else's money." ICANN will be meeting next week in Ghana - ought to be a feisty meeting.

Comments

My biggest annoyance with the ICANN

[Kiwi]

My personal biggest annoyance with the ICANN is that they have been dragging their feet with regard to support for internationalized characters in domain names. The problem is this: Domain names traditionally only had English language letters [A-Za-z] and the '-' symbol as part of domain names. (The '.' character signifies a delimiter in domain name labels; it isn't there in the DNS packet sent over the wire.)

The problem with this is that this has a western-centric point of view which does not take in to account the writing systems that foreign languages use.

Now, the ICANN was in a position to officially push forward some specification, any specification to allow international characters in domain names. Unfortunatly, they were too busy spending million of dollars on international conferences, staying in five star hotels, to actually do anything about this problem.

International domain labels work right now with current DNS servers and DNS client software. One can type in, say español.example.com in Mozilla, and MaraDNS, not to mantion DjbDNS, will correctly resolve this domain name. The trick: Mozilla uses UTF-8 to encode international characters in domain names, and both MaraDNS and DjbDNS can handle domain names with UTF-8 characters.

- Sam