[vip] ICANN variant project update

[SM]

At 14:41 04-01-2012, Andrew Sullivan wrote:
>ICANN is eagerly soliciting comments, and I hope that those of you
>interested in this topic will take the time to read the report and
>send your observations.  Having been a participant in this particular

I browsed through the report.  I found it difficult to understand.

   "if an email is sent to localpart at dname.example.com and that name has a
    DNAME that resolves to realname.example.com, the mail transport agent is
    not going to rewrite the server-part of the address."

I have some doubts about whether the above is correct.

    "It might, however, be one important type of variant-inspiring 
behavior, because
      most of the deployed code today supports IDNA2003 and not IDNA2008."

I did not find any comment in the report about how to reverse the trend.

    "The users of the DNS are varied in respect of what they expect, 
what they want, and
     what they need."

This section lumps users and technical usage together.  There is not 
much of a difference between Law enforcement and other security 
investigators and end users.  Instead of System administrators and 
Software developers, it would have been clearer to discuss technical 
usage and the issues that may occur.

   "Similarly, any site renumbering and so on will require twice the effort"

I don't see what site renumbering has to do with (DNS) strings.

    "These issues are noted in recent reports from ICANN's Security 
and Stability
      Advisory Committee (such as SSAC 051)"

That's a report on "Domain Name WHOIS Terminology and 
Structure".  Which name to call WHOIS is not an issue.

   "Areas of application behavior, resolution and registration 
services, WHOIS service,
    and business logic all need to be examined in order to determine 
if these objectives
    are achievable."

This is buried deep within the report.

There are some examples to illustrate how the Internet, which has 
been reduced to web and email, may be affected.  The web examples are 
simplistic.

The two words which stand out in the report are Cost and DNAME.  The 
report emphasizes that there will be higher costs in all areas; i.e. 
an increase in revenue for anyone with an interest in the work, from 
ICANN or the software developer.  DNAME might be read as the 
off-the-self "solution" to technical problems.

Regards,
-sm