Re: [I18ndir] [Last-Call] [art] Artart last call review of draft-ietf-regext-epp-eai-12

[John C Klensin <[e-mail]>]

--On Friday, August 26, 2022 12:02 -0700 Asmus Freytag
<[e-mail]> wrote:

> On 8/26/2022 11:48 AM, John C Klensin wrote:
>>   there have been periodic proposals to reduce chaos in
>> the DNS and on the Internet by getting of all gTLDs that do
>> not serve an obvious international purpose and restricting TLD
>> labels to ISO 3166-1 alpha-2 codes and a_very_  small number
>> of exceptions, none of them involving non-Latin characters.
> 
> While to the making of many proposals is no end (to paraphrase
> an early source), this doesn't mean that they are likely to go
> anywhere.

Agreed.

> Adoption of any such proposals would run into very
> serious headwinds in regions that see this as a perfect issue
> to assert national identity via domain names.

Actually, some of those places wanting to assert national
identity are among the source of some of the proposals to shift
things more toward nationally-rooted names.

> That alone would be a good enough reason to not spending time
> on mentioning them.

probably, yes. But they do go to Martin's point/suggestions.

> PS: it's not clear to me whether "strings" as means of
> accessing resources that are exposed in the UI or document
> contents will remain the preferred technology. So far, search
> and the use of apps have resulted in some inroads, but we are
> still far from an inflection point. If and when we reach it,
> any of these considerations, but also the proposals you
> mentioned are automatically moot.

Yes.  But, again, for email addresses as contact information or
identifiers -- a different problem than "accessing resources"
more generally -- I note that there have been proposals around
for international directories of such addresses (probably a
prerequisite for any form of searching or inexact matching that
does not depend on the strings themselves) since at least the
early 1980s.  Progress so far, zero.

While these are interesting issues, none of them have anything
to do with whether having a way to transmit an all-ASCII
alternative to a non-ASCII email address, when the latter may be
used in unpredictable international contexts, is desirable or
important.

  best,
   john