Re: [idn] WG last call summary

["D. J. Bernstein" <djb@cr.yp.to>]

Adam M. Costello writes:
> If this were considered a show-stopper, the working group could have
> conceded defeat and disbanded long ago.

Interoperability failures _are_ a show-stopper. Imagine looking a user
in the eye and explaining to him why you screwed up his email delivery.

The whole point of IDNA was the promise of immediate IDN deployment. You
should have stopped pushing IDNA last July, when we discovered that the
deployment plan was inherently broken.

You now attempt to defend IDNA by attacking other proposals. This is the
ethically bankrupt ``We have to _do something_'' argument once again.

If every proposal before the IDN WG is harmful, then the IDN WG will
have to adopt _none_ of the proposals. The IETF procedures do not say
``It's okay to make an incredibly destructive modification to the
Internet protocol suite if you have to _do something_.'' How many times
do I have to say this before it sinks in?

(In fact, there are proposals that _don't_ break anything. I could easily
shred your ``no matter what we do, things will break'' claim. But this
doesn't matter right now.)

IDNA is harmful. Therefore, IDNA must not move forward. Once again: IDNA
has received strong written objections from at least fifteen regular WG
participants and _hundreds_ of other people. The merits of other
proposals are simply not relevant.

---D. J. Bernstein, Associate Professor, Department of Mathematics,
Statistics, and Computer Science, University of Illinois at Chicago