Re: [idn] Document Status?

[Ted Hardie <Ted.Hardie@nominum.com>]

> I believe many of those who have proposed registration-based
> restrictions have assumed that a restriction on, say, registrations in
> .ie. to use only characters which are valid in Irish would somehow
> apply to the characters allowed in hostnames under .example.ie.  As
> John's point makes clear, this isn't true.  Ensuring that folks
> outside this group understand this point may be critical to getting
> reasonable deployment once IDN is in the wild.
> 

It's been pointed out to me that a registry can, of course, refuse
to delegate to those who do not agree to impose the same restrictions
on their registrations as on the parent.   I think this actually
highlights the problem:  any restriction is administrative and
exists *only as policy*.  To put it more bluntly:

The protocol doesn't care.

For those who are helping registries understand the impact of all of
this, it may be useful to repeat this mantra at frequent intervals, so
that they understand that their restrictions, desires, and preferred
mappings simply do not exist at the protocol level.  Any attempts to
restrict, to establish mappings or otherwise satisfy their desires
should not rely on protocol action.  

			regards,
				Ted Hardie