<quote> [14] At the core of all of the IAB's concerns is the architectural principle that the DNS is a lookup service which must behave in an interoperable, predictable way at all levels of the DNS hierarchy. Furthermore, as a lookup service it is such a fundamental part of the Internet's infrastructure that converting it to an application-based search service, as the deployed system does, is not appropriate even in the case where the query presented would not normally map to a registered domain. </quote> I have to accept IAB's concerns about VGRS solutions. But, if such solutions will be timedout and phased out after 2 years and operated with care under IAB's new "operational guidelines", those harms can be minimized, while it will give great boostup to plugins distributions. I expect ICANN will consider the bright side of the solutions and make balanced decisions. Many asian region NICs are considering to put even non-ASCII labels in their zone (not IDNA-compatibile) with slightly different approaches, even after they become fully aware of those caveats behind their approaches.
Soobok,IDNA/stringprep/nameprep introduce confusions,collisions and uncertainty to the DNS systems much more than VGRS specific implementation/deployment solutions does ,as explained in ICANN BoD's last resolutions in Shanghai..
At the risk of reopening a debate that was never satisfactorily resolved, if the issue is merely one of permitting non-ASCII characters to be used in identifiers, with those identifiers being placed in DNS labels, IDNA is fine. It may even be more complex and protective than is needed for that purpose (just as the LDH rules were more than is needed for strict identifier use in ASCII). To my knowledge, neither the IAB nor the IESG have taken a formal position on whether registration guidelines are either necessary or sufficient to resolve any presumed problems with IDNA. If, by contrast, someone is expecting IDNA to solve the most general of user-interface searching and navigation problems, that expectation is completely unrealistic. I think just about everyone knows that is the case at this stage, if only because it is clear that the DNS is inadequate to solve that problem for names that are restricted to ASCII. Some marketing organizations might like to pretend otherwise, but that doesn't make success in use of the DNS as a general-purpose search environment any more likely.IESG/IAB are willing to justify that IDNA by supplemental Registrations guidelines ? If IDNA can be justified in such a way, why not VGRS solutions ? :-) Still I hope IAB can express such consistent conservatism also to IDNA/nameprep itself, which is the source of all these hassles...