[arabic-vip] ZWNJ (earlier: [vip] Overarching principles used in Devanagari team report)

[Andrew Sullivan]

Dear colleagues,

On Fri, Sep 23, 2011 at 09:43:09AM -0400, Behnam Esfahbod wrote:
> 
> So, the question would be are we in a place to prevent all of these
> names from being a TLD in the future?

I think it is extremely important to note that the policies being
adopted are not necessarily permanent policies for all time.  Zone
operation policy can change over time.  Indeed, if it couldn't, no IDN
could be accepted into the root zone, because if one reads RFC 1123
section 2.1 as being a statement of policy, that policy still says "no
IDNA labels in the root".  Clearly, that is changing.

As I guess I've argued repeatedly, recently, it is better for the root
if we start with more restrictive rules first, with a plan to
understand the implications of widening those rules before we do so.
(I'd argue this is a good rule for every zone, but especially good in
the case of the root, since everyone needs to share that resource.)
Note that this necessarily entails that some words in some languages,
and some otherwise desirable labels, are all prevented from
registration (or, for that matter, are prevented from registration
when some other registration happens).  In my opinion, this is a
feature and not a bug: the wider the scope of sudden expansion of the
root, the wider the scope for surprises and problems.  Prudence
suggests that a slow evolution of the rules is safer.

Best regards,

A


-- 
Andrew Sullivan
ajs at anvilwalrusden.com