Re: [dnsext] Some thoughts on the updated aliasing draft

[Cary Karp <[e-mail]>]

Quoting Suzanne

> Well....I hope they will speak for themselves, but I think at this
> point that what "the IDN people" want from the DNS people is some real
> sense of what's possible, with roughly what tradeoffs. I think they
> want any news we can give them, even if it's bad (and I'm not even
> sure this is bad news).
> 
> We can go into this a little more (briefly) in the session Monday
> afternoon-- Andrew and anyone else who was in the ICANN IDN meetings
> in San Francisco can probably shed some light.

The impression I got from the ICANN IDN meetings in San Francisco was
that the people who frequent such events have a strong qualitative sense
of there being a problem but haven't yet managed to articulate it
clearly, much less solve it. What might constitute a solution from their
perspective is similarly elusive, but in ICANN terms would mean
something that can serve as a basis for "consensus policies" (the
sidestepping of which caused the present headache, in the first place).

The expectation on the ICANN side has always been that the technical
community, by virtue of its superior understanding of the quantifiable
intricacies of the DNS, would be able to extrapolate whatever it needs
to know about "the problem" from the discussion as it is being conducted
in the ICANN venue. There is no basis for assuming that the potential
insufficiency of that belief can be successfully communicated, so the
best we're going to be able to do here is second guess something that
might actually help. If that were an unequivocal statement of bad news,
I have no idea how it would be received, but suspect that it's unsafe to
make any assumptions about its potential for bringing the discussion to
an end.

/Cary