briman1970 said:
It looks pretty darn likely to me. In fact, this is one of the reasons I held off on buying IDNs for so long. I just knew they would eventually push this idea forward. If they don't accomplish it this go around, you can bet that it will be revisited in the future.
How worthless will our IDN .coms and .nets become if this comes to fruition?
Well you misunderstood so you have blown it. IDN.com will be represented as IDN.IDN in many different guises. It will still be dot com and it will will resolve whichever way you type it in. Those that have invested are minted. Those that have held back have dipped out again!
wasistdas said:
This will kill internet, imho
How is that exactly? Would you care to share you thought processes, or do you just make wild statements?
Jawn said:
Im not sure what this means, could anyone explain abit shorter? what problems will occur?
As anyone who has looked at this will already now IDN.com resolve through the DNS Root already. Full functionality depends on having a browser that support IDN. The browser converts the Unicode (Local Character Sets) to Punycode (ASCII encodement). The domains that are actually registered are the punycode version. The simply represent Chinese, Japanese, Arabic etc characters. At the moment only the generally recognised gTLDs, sTLDs and ccTLDs in Latin characters will resolve. If you put IDN.IDN into your browser it will send Punycode.Punycode to the Root, but the Root won't recognise .Punycode, so it won't resolve.
Two methods have been proposed for the introduction of IDN.IDN. One is to introduce Punycode strings into the Root. The second is the divert them to DNAME aliasing which is essentially a small look-up database that decides which of the existing gTLDs or ccTLDs those punycode strings corresponds to. It then forwards them to the Registry Servers for resolution.
The more likely to be implemented of the two is the DNAME system which has been proposed by Verisign. If this is introduced it does not involve the creation of an new Real Name but a myriad of Virtual Names which are aliased to Real Names. If this is introduced IDN.com holders are golden.
The other possibility is direct entry into the Root as Punycode. If this is implemented to ccTLD these will be paired and the IDN.com will simply be forwarded to IDN.ASCII. If this is also done for gTLDs, which frankly is not really that likely, a new extension would need to be created for each language for each TLD and all of the variants would need to be forwarded to the gTLDs. It has been suggest that the variants could be established as Registries in their own right, but frankly this is the most unlikely outcome.
Not only are the issues over Intellectual Property rights which the likes are Verisign are likely to defend aggresively, but their are huge problems relating to who would have control of the characters. Take Urdu for example. It is the official language of Pakistan, but more Indians use it than Pakistanis. The script and much vocabulary is shared with Farsi and Arabic. So who would have the rights to this, well search me, but you would be kicking off World War III.
In the short-term nothing is likely to happen but with advent of IE7 IDN.com is set to become a defacto standard with Verisign leading the charge in the IDN.IDN stakes. The smart money was on IDN.com about 12 months ago. There are plenty of opportunities in the secondary market which is still very cheap, but there is little of great value available for new regging.