The message from CDNC says that the Traditional-Simplified problem for Chinese users cannot be solved by registration policy. This is not true, and many of the CDNC members who have come to IETF meetings know that. Of course, CDNC members would like to maximize their financial gain in registration, but the concern of the IETF is always towards helping users. There is a huge different between "cannot be solved" and "it will cost a small number of organizations a lot of money".
Solving the Traditional-Simplified problem in the IDN protocol would have given more uniform results for users. The intense discussions over the past 18 months have shown that not only is it unlikely that there will ever be an IETF-based solution, and it has also become clear that a registration-based solution will likely give Chinese users more sensible naming that anything than the IETF could standardize. For example, in the IDN WG, the proposals from CDNC members only addressed part of the Traditional-Simplified problem (the 1:1 mapping), while the registration solution can address all of the problem in a manner that will help Chinese users. Due to the efforts of some CDNC members, the IETF is now well aware of the "2^n" variant problem that is unique to the use of Han characters in the Chinese language. Fortunately, using registration guidelines will solve the problem. The only people seriously affected by the size of DNS zones created by the "2^n" problem will be very large, flat zones such as those managed by CDNC members, but they are able to compensate for the size of zones with no changes to the DNS protocols. Of course, the character variant problem exists in many different languages, not just in Chinese. Because of this, each registry or zone that includes IDN names needs to make decisions about name equivalence (and therefore multiple registrations) before they enter any IDN names into their zone. Based on this input during Working Group last call from the CDNC, it seems clear that we need to explain these points more in the IDNA document. --Paul Hoffman, Director --Internet Mail Consortium
