RE: [ga] IDN issues (was: On Elections)

["Debbie Garside" <debbie@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Well done JFC you have managed to mention me 14 times in this email.  Most
of the content has just enough truth to make people believe it.  However,
JFC I find it very sad that you have to make so many false claims wrt the
work that others have done.  The only dialog you are having with ISO JFC or
anyone else for that matter, is one way... nobody responds to trolls who
claim the work of others, cybersquat domains and threaten legal action all
the while sending troll like emails spouting lie after lie after lie.  What
work is it that you have actually achieved JFC because all I can see is the
work of others?  Who exactly are you dealing with at ISO JFC because as far
as I am aware the rule has been not to respond to you since you threatened
legal action for some ridiculously obscure reason.  How many emails have you
sent so far this week JFC? to my colleagues at ISO, WLDC, GeoLang, BSI.
What a shame JFC I am sure that there is an intelligent man underneath all
your troll like ways.  What a shame JFC that you continue to cybersquat
wldc.org... hope you have fun with it.  What a shame you have to tell so
many untruths JFC.  What a shame JFC for the type of life you have that
makes this sort of thing necessary for you.  I feel sorry for you JFC.  Rest
assured JFC I will never work with you so maybe you should give up trying to
wheedle your way in.  Sorry I only managed to mention your name 12 times...
Feel free to attack me again and again I'm used to it now as are the British
and French governments.
 
Have a nice day JFC (13)
 
Debbie
 
 


  _____  

From: owner-ga@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx [mailto:owner-ga@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx] On Behalf Of
JFC Morfin
Sent: 06 October 2007 04:42
To: ga@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx
Subject: [ga] IDN issues (was: On Elections)


At 10:00 05/10/2007, Debbie Garside wrote:


I agree.  But if you remember, my involvement started when I could not bear
to see 90% of the posts on this list bashing ICANN over the head with a big
stick in a completely destructive, certainly non-constructive way. :-)  The
other 10% being made up of posts threatening litigation/slanging matches
with only 1% being useful, informative and constructive.


I note that the response I am going to make here is authoritative. 
This is therefore typically what Danny, Sotiris, and Debbie want for the
GNSO/GA. 



>Do you have any idea how much expertise is
> represented on this list?  I think it's pretty safe to say
> that after 8 years of existence this ML community has matured
> to a point where knowledge has an open arena... shall we not
> make use of it in an ordered, measured, thoughtful way?

That would be an excellent idea - wish I had thought of it before :-)


I hope it is presented and will be read and possibly debated in an ordred,
measured, thoughtful way. This is why it will be a report as one may expect
in a competent decision making conference. This is also why I will ask for
advices from the members of BoD, Constituencies and Staff participating to
this GA.



>I want to
> thank Andy Gardner for teaching me something about IDN and
> ascii issues that I didn't know...

This is a subject very close to me and at present I am unable to comment too
much due to an ISO NWIP for Internationalized Country Codes that is
currently out for vote.  I am the Editor of the said NWIP and at this
present moment it looks like it might fail which is a damn shame because if
it does it is my belief that there will be mayhem if IDN TLDs are introduced
piecemeal in an unstructured way.  I may comment further after the 10th.



This comment from Debbie Garside is important. As Debbie and I are in fact
at the core of this issue, which affects the international structure and
naming of the Internet, I think I should document this in more detail.

NWIP - ISO New Work Item Proposal

An ISO NWIP is a proposition for a new standard to be initiated. It is
proposed by a country Member (ISO is not a UN body, but rather an
association of national standardization entities, such as ANSI in the USA,
DIN in Germany, etc.). A Proposed Project Leader is associated.

The text of the NWIP that Debbie refers to was worked out in Paris on June
8, 2007 (at an ISO/BSI/AFNOR/ICANN/Jefsey conciliatory meeting) in
opposition to my suggestions preventing it from becoming (as expected by the
ISO Central Secretariat in calling for this conciliatory meeting) a
consensual and technically sensible document. 

It is noteworthy that Debbie continues to claim that she is the NWIP Editor.
I understand that she is claiming this in order to be entirely responsible
for the British BSI proposition about making the "internationalization" of
the namespace an official standard, as a continuation of the Unix/IETF
approach. She is actually listed as Project Leader.

Technically, internationalization with the localization of the ends equates
to the globalization proposition (cf. Unicode). It is, in other words,
limited support for "non-ASCII script" languages in using English as a core
and pivotal language (cf. RFC 3935). This is considered adequate only by
English speakers. Apart from the obvious US strategic and commercial
interests therein, it seems straight out of the RFCs, and it is said to be
the maximum that Internet technology can deliver. 

ICANN Position

I want to note that ICANN was represented by Bart Bowswinkle and Jaap
Akkerhuis, and that their position was completely neutral. 

They explained that ICANN had an internal process underway to determine a
position, did not request anything from ISO, in turn respecting what the
international standardization, user practice, and IETF could come up with.
Due to immediate and persistent odd rumors stating that I would have
supported the NWIP text, I had to to let everyone know in the following
hours to that my agreement with the ICANN position. 

I still support it, even if I disagree with most of the ccNSO/GAC reports:
their propositions are not the final ICANN positions (at least as of yet)
that I feel are much more realistic and in tune with the IGF common
thinking. I also want to point out that I confused the propositions made by
Debbie in Lisbon and her her claim that she was a Member of the ccNSO/GAC
demonstrated her being supported by ccNSO. I was corrected by the ccNSO
Chair and Bart.

Internationalization vs. Multilingualization

The technical inadequacies and limitations of this "internationalization" is
the reason for the delays in linguistic domain names, the Multilingual
Internet, the local sustainable development of e-commerce, etc. The reason
is that it does not work well or easily, and it is not very appealing to
users: internationalization results in violations of the WTC TBT rules
(technical barriers to trade), linguistic Human Rights, GAC and WSIS
principles; it does not match UNESCO campaigns to support cyberspace
linguistic diversity, universal demands for multilingualization, such as
Andy's last one, millennium objectives, $100 computer program
specifications. 

This does not mean that Debbie was wrong in supporting
"internationalization". She actually represented the IETF and Unicode line
of thinking followed by IETF for a decade, under the leadership of two
Chairs (Harald Alvestrand [now an ICANN BoD Member] and Brian Carpenter)
that were also Unicode BoD Members. She did this after having gathered a
brilliant panel of experts (http://thewldc.org <http://thewldc.org/> ) that
I already documented, which includes leaders from the IETF BCP47 current
process and ISO TC37.

"Multilingualization" means to be able to support every language just as
English is supported today, in which internationalization makes way for
every language to be limitedly supported as a localized version of an
internationalized English. 

A new change is that we know now that we can make multilingualization work
much more easily than internationalization (cf. infra). 

My suggestion after the AFNOR decision

What is now under discussion (of which Debbie refers to) is that the
negative result of the NWIP vote (which has already been documented online
by ISO) will only be announced next Thursday [4 week delay]. French AFNOR
wants this to occur in this way in order to permit additional comments. I
have, therefore, proposed for it to also be accompanied by an agreement from
all the involved parties to jointly work on a new consensual NWIP that would
be voted on as soon as possible.

For the international network and community, this would transform a negative
response into a positive and consensual result by way of four points: 

1. we accept that it has demonstrated a consensus between normative bodies
and civil society, the business world, governments, and international
entities (IGF) [this is a de facto rejected appeal of Debbie against the
prior ISO vote of the ISO 3166-1:2006 standard, which is in this way fully
confirmed].

2. that "internationalization" is not an appropriate final solution - but it
is widely supported, and should continue to improve. Therefore, the priority
is interoperability with every new emerging proposition - along with the
WSIS Tunis agreement (which is the reason why the IESG was able to accept
[just a few hours later] the publication of RFC 4646, without any
international legal objection of mine). 

3. that metalingualization - as per the ISO 3166-1:2006 paradigm and the
IETF proposed script/language split - provides a good, simple, and stable
basis to develop multilingualization solutions atop.

4. that we convene, under the authority of ISO 3166/MA, a working group
including all the concerned parties (starting with ICANN, GAC, ccTLDs,
Debbie's corporation, WDLC she is the CEO, MINC, UNESCO, ITU, IGF, IAB,
IETF, ISO/TC37 and ISO/TC46, MLTF, AILF, Unicode, etc.). 

It should write the new consensual NWIP (of which Debbie could remain the
Project Manager). 

Proposed priorities

I proposed that we should then pay special attention to:

- interoperability during the transition development and emerging multiple
new services of this effort and the resulting Internet architectural
dynamism that it should foster; 

- immediate support of IDNs along GAC and IGF principles, equally respecting
every national sovereignty and local community governance's decisions
(especially for small ccTLDs), 

- urgent work on local/lingual TLDs and distributed namespaces (in relation
with the work that the MLTF [Multi Lingual Technical Forum that I moderate]
has engaged in on semantic addressing),

- technical specifications [along the ISO definition] for the way to
approach the ISO 3166-1:2006 paradigm.

Technical considerations

This is a very complex and architecturally new issue and I was largely
opposed by the wide majority of the IETF.

The whole issue is complex because of the way the IETF and ISO considered
it. From a historical progress point of view (Harald Alvestand's successive
RFCs and Unicode development). Therefore, they never referred to it as part
of a complete communication theory extended model. 

Recently, John Klensin proposed an important change on
idna-update@xxxxxxxxxxxxx (in June but not even yet worked on) to split the
script and language issues. Until then, IETF was engaged in a _major_ layer
violation [not yet acknowledged by many] between what belongs to:

- on the one side, to the physical transport and digital presentation of the
content - what Internet and applications usually do (with the additional
difficulty that TCP/IP has no presentation layer)

- on the other side, to its semantic understanding (what the carried content
does mean). 

Debbie's NWIP result brings a normative experimental confirmation to what
TC46 has already applied in ISO 3166-1:2006, which was voted on one year
ago; and what the IETF has only started to discover.

We can certainly understand an initial bitterness. However, she did believe
my positions were to be opposed and tested. She did it: others only
continued with their ad-hominems (the technical arguments of those having
none) and exclusion. This is the correct way standardization has to work and
I am glad she did it (however, it could have been done differently)

The consequences

It was perfectly correct to hesitate about all this and about exactly when
to consider the transition. Confusion came from at least two main separated
places. Understanding this might have a major impact on the Internet, its
architectural culture, paradigm, and naming business.

(1) the DNS belongs to physical and digital addressing (the current IETF
major issue) and to semantic addressing (the meaning of the associated
mnemonics). That is the source of the ICANN mission creep (Trade Marks,
UDRPs, IDNs) and of the IETF main-layer violation. 

Semantics is out of the IETF scope and IAB opposes the very use of the
"multilingual" term in RFCs. When considering today's importance of metadata
and semantic issues one can better measure the importance of this
clarification. This led me to create the emerging MLTF in order to support
the Multilingual and Semantic Internet architectural and technical issues. 

(2) there is a need for at least three different definitions of what
languages are, at:

- ISO TC37 (where Debbie's ISO 639 related work belongs), which is
interested in cataloging and describing languages in search engines,
libraries, etc. However, that first definition is not yet given. 

- Unicode, IETF, and ICANN, which should be interested in relation spaces
and routing upon external formated language information. However, that
second definition is not given either

- ISO TC46, which is interested in the way they are used. A language is
implied by the WTC TBT agreement to mean: it is a human relational system
that can be imposed without being (and that must be supported in order not
to be) a technical barrier to trade.

These are three orthogonal things that the IETF confused in the RFC 4646
debate: my tweaking of their text was to permit the resulting RFC 4646 to
remain interoperable with the three of them. I hope the ISO TC46 confirmed
clarification will now help ICANN, Unicode, IETF and possibly TC37 to better
analyze what a language represents at their own individual layer.

Questions posed to this GA

I also hope that our past technical opposition does not prevent us to
concert. I already proposed this when the NWIP was started, in which I was
rebuked on this very list. If this is the case once again, the MLTF would
only continue its Open Standard 3166-4 initiative, along the ISO 3166 rules.


(1) throughout this process the Internet was represented by ICANN. The ISO
3166/MA invited ICANN/IANA as a Member. They never attended meetings or
participated until the last yearly meeting. At the Paris meeting, last June,
ICANN made it clear that they had to comply with the market/users
expectations [they cannot support an XY ccTLD when everyone around the world
uses ZX as a country code for the concerned country].

Question: since GAC is only a representation of the richest countries, who
already are members of the IGF multistakeholders governance, I wonder if
ICANN should continue to be represented by the IANA or if it should be
represented by an ICANN GA, or not represented at all but rather through a
technical liaison?


(2) this process leads IAB and IETF to consider liaisons with ISO TC46. 

Question: should ccTLDs and Users not also have such a liaison. Should it be
through this GA, the ccNSO, and all-ccTLD constituency or dynamic coalition,
a national Internet community representation, a whole ICANN GA? 


(3) I am engaged in a negotiation with the ISO Central Secretariat over the
protection of the ISO users' interest and their representation. ISO Members
are in most cases regulated by national laws. However, there is no one to
represent the international users of international norms and standards as
such.

The special case of ISO 3166 is central, as it standardizes the core of the
regalian attributes (sovereignty, country name, country code, non-TBT
languages and script, administrative units, and [through ISO 11179
compatible metadata registries] will extend its influence to all data having
a national and lingual aspect. As such, it is said to be the Constitution of
the virtual world.

Question: how could user control and contributions be organized? Should it
be specific to the Internet (an Internet-GA?), should this GA be involved?
Should an ICANN-GA be involved? or should this be through an ISO User
Interest Group to create? Could this be an IGF Dynamic Coalition? 


(4) GAC and WSIS principles state that a country has no capacity to
influence the namespaces of another country. RFC 1591 says the TLD Manager
is the trustee of the local community. This seems to contradict some of the
GAC, ccNSO, ICANN, IETF conceptions and practices. The Internet RFCs
consider the global and local Internet communities. WSIS believes that the
Internet Governance is carried on a multistakeholder basis. 

Question: should National Internet Communities not form an ICANN
constituency parallel to the ccNSO, GAC, and BC? Should they not be involved
in the ccTLD delegations, creation of lingual TLDs, etc. Should they not be
involved in the IANA language and country databases? 


(5) MLTF engaged work on semantic addressing and routing (the location of
concepts, information, etc. and their relative meaning, in every possible
language, technology, and services) tends to show that 

- the DNS is a very small part of it, 

- the most appropriate systems to resolve these addresses are DDDS, an IETF
defined system family, which includes the DNS.

Question: this creates a need to coordinate Semantic Addressing, Trade
Marks, cataloging, etc. governance and business management. Where should
such an emerging issue be addressed?


(6) IDNs, and further on LDNs (local/language Domain Names), raise a large
number of issues, in which none of the ICANN numerous committees have
discussed or engaged in proper dialog with the concerned experts.

Question: should not GNSO/GA Members form an IDN-WG, and be welcome in every
ICANN IDN related WG or SIG on a reciprocal basis?


(7) There is a need for an open, serious, measured, diplomatic,
professional, competent, and representative mailing list to discuss "3166-4"
(how to use ISO 3166 in a multilingual context). 

Question: could this GNSO/GA mailing list be a candidate for such a task?
Should it be a new specialized list? Would you like to participate in such a
list? How should such a list articulate along with the GNSO/GA mailing list,
a possible ICANN-GA and/or an Internet-GA mailing list.


(8) IPv6 will probably not make it. This means that address shortage will
start hitting large and ISP projects in different ways. The same IDN and
Multilingual Internet delays affect national or service providers projects.
It is likely that new and multitechnology IP and Semantic addressing needs
and solutions will emerge. 

The priority is to maintain the end to end nature of the Internet and to
foster the development of the brain to brain semantic interintelligibility
relations. This calls for the interoperability of the new practices and
standards that are being developed and of the emerging operational modes.

Question: where should such an interoperability be documented, maintained,
and debated? Would this GA as a users' GA be a proper bootstrap for an
initiative in that area? Should it be in cooperation with some Open Standard
efforts? How should multilingual contributions be supported? 


I thank you for your time and cooperation in reading, and possibly
commenting on, this note. 
jfc
I thank you for your cooperation in reading and possibly commenting this
note.
jfc