[idn] Re: Another solution?

[Simon Josefsson <simon+idn@josefsson.org>]

C C Magnus Gustavsson <mag@lysator.liu.se> writes:

> We could consider wiping the slate clean and design a new protocol.
> (Bear with me just a little while longer.) Let's call it e g INS (for
> Internet Name System or International Names System) to distinguish it
> from DNS and ask IANA to assign, say, port 40 for it's use. We would
> not only be able to introduce non-ASCII domain names using UTF-8 in a
> nice, clean fashion and in accordance with RFC 2277. We could double
> (or triple) the maximal allowed length for domain names and have four
> times the number of flags. We could introduce a version number in the
> protocol to make future changes easier and use experience with EDNS to
> make it easier to expand in the future if needed. We could replace SRV
> records (RFC 2782) with a cleaner and better solution, introducing
> QSERV and QPROTO fields in the queries. And so on. All in all, we
> could clean up and improve the current DNS standard significantly.

I think many people have been thinking about this.  However, people
seems to fear that designing a new protocol would increase the speed
of namespace fragmentation.  foo.com would be available in DNS and not
in INS and vice versa.  I believe the "namespace fragmentation"
argument is a poor one -- namespace fragmentation isn't a protocol
issue, it is a political issue.  Put pressure on organizations
handling the namespace to not fragment it and they won't fragment it.
If the pressure isn't there, they will continue to do whatever they
can get away with.