At 13:04 -0400 3/9/09, Andrew Sullivan (based on someone else's note) wrote:
His suggestion is to re-iterate the alphabetic-only criterion, except to allow one extension to permit A-labels conforming to IDNA2008 (which work, note, is not yet complete). In addition, I think he believes that the document should also require that any U-label that is to correspond with an A-label that is added to the root zone must _also_ be alphabetic.
For those of us not reading idnabis, what is an A-label and what is a U-label? I have not seen a reference to their definition so I'm assuming these are idnabis terms.
I will say that I am (personally, no hats) uneasy importing to the technical constraints on top level labels what seem to me to be policy considerations. Such policy considerations seem to me to be the sort of thing that ought to be handled in policy-making bodies set up for the purpose. At the same time, I accept the argument that there are strong technical reasons to minimize the changes to rules about the root zone, since we know there are many DNS-using systems in the world built around fragile readings of various RFCs. So I'm of two minds about the position I've laid out above.
The problem with saying "these are the technical rules and they shouldn't be changed" is that this essentially closes off the global public Internet from becoming global. If the Internet is based on "fragile readings of various RFCs" then the Internet should be the entity that "suffers" not the world economy it serves.
I understand the advantages of maintaining technical purity, but what good is it if the purity was defined by a small percentage of the population and then the putiry maintained resulting in there being an "technical elite? (Even I have relatives that do not speak English.)
I agree though that "policy...ought to be handled in policy-making bodies." I have used the statement "bus drivers shouldn't determine the bus route" a few times in the past - meaning here that having DNS experts determine the rules for what's to be allowed in the global public Internet root zone is a misplaced assignment. For engineers, no change in the specification is always good. For the DNS, it doesn't matter what's in that root (so long as it's globally coherent). But it matters to a lot of other protocols.
Ultimately, I think that there are no technical restrictions on what is placed in the root, no algorithmic way to say "thumbs up" or say "thumbs down."
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