[UA-discuss] GNSO requested deferral of IDN Guidelines 4.0 Vote - CPH / Registrants impact

[Jothan Frakes]

The GNSO just sent a letter to request that the vote on adoption of the IDN
Guidelines 4.0 be deferred

There is some UA pain that will come from these Guidelines we should be
completely aware of.

It is important to identify the manner in which standards can impact the
contracted parties, such as the Registries and Registrars, but getting even
further out the supply chain into registrants and Internet users, there are
some impacts to them as well as their audiences.

If the new standard causes something that was a separate registration to
become a variant of another registration, or invalidates an existing
registration, this is a bad outcome for the innovators, developers, and
early patrons that supported the internationalization of the namespace.

Part of what the objective of UA is, to my reckoning, is to increase
engagement and support of coding projects that will require adoption of
standards that may not immediately hold levels of RoI to them, and they are
looking for reasons not to do them.

These new guidelines are good - and needed - they are the result of many
people's hard work, time and wisdom, and address many solutions.  The
approach of pushing these out is problematic.  Further, there seems no
recourse for those (even if statistically small) who may be impacted
adversely, lose their domain, or have it be invalidated (and thus REVERSE
their UA experience)

There is potential impact to existing TLDs, and most notably to registrants
of second level names where there are registrations using former standards
that become unsupported or invalidated.

A very important challenge we face with the UA effort is inspiring
developers to implement IDN and EAI as we help globalize the Internet
through our work.

IF the approach on standards will be to invalidate some portion of the
community of registrations like this, there must be attention to how this
impacts existing innovators.

Innovators worked to drive the standards and increase awareness - and the
invalidation or deprecation of a registration that someone has carried for
a number of years (some are 15+ years) is the precise opposite of a reward
for early support, and it is going to send a very loud message to
developers.

I believe that further review is needed by registries on the technical
impacts of the changes, but any delay can help ICANN and the community
address the disenfranchisement factor.

This should be important to UASG - we need developers to embrace the
additional effort that they have to invest in their work to consider IDN,
EAI and other things.

-Jothan


Jothan Frakes
+1.206-355-0230 tel
+1.206-201-6881 fax
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