google Web chief warns of domain name chaos - Sydney Morning Herald

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Web chief warns of domain name chaos
Sydney Morning Herald, Australia - 1 hour ago
Plans to fast-track the introduction of non-English characters in website domain names could "break the whole internet", warns ICANN chief executive Paul Twomey ...


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[QuantumBeam]

interesting............

 

[olebean]

interesting............

An inevitability

 

[acesfull]

At present there are 37 possible characters that can be used in domain names, but if non-English letters are allowed, this number would rise to 50,000or more, said Twomey.

Domain names will *still* contain only 37 possible characters, in the form of punycode, like xn--f9b5b1c6b7k.com. IDNs are actually aliases for domain names that begin with "xn--"

Plans to fast-track the introduction of non-English characters in website
domain names could "break the whole internet", warns ICANN chief executive Paul Twomey.

What is breakable are the Internet applications that communicate with each
other, depending on what they do with domain names - which may simply be to encode and decode, mainly for displaying the appropraite characters in place of the punycode.

But Twomey refuses to rush the process, and is currently conducting "laboratory testing" to ensure that nothing can go wrong.

I know there must be underlying issues of which I am unaware, so I guess Twomey (and the engineers) want to insure that they've got everything covered (including their butts). Plus, I would think politics plays a role, and they want to stay on their own timeline for rolling out IDNs.

One source ... said that the Anglo-centric internet left people isolated and
marginalised.

Kind of like some of the IDN'ers in this forum?
Ref: http://www.dnforum.com/showthread.php?t=187671&highlight=dropping

"The internet is like a fifteen story building, and with international domain
names what we're trying to do is change the bricks in the basement," he said.

I was thinking it would be more like adding a sidecar to a regular motorcycle.

Poor implementation of foreign domain names may also pose security risks,
whereby fraud artists could create websites with names that appear identical to current English language sites, but in fact replace some of the English characters with similar-looking foreign characters.

Here we go, with the phishing crap again!

In light of this, ICANN is working closely with developers to ensure that applications such as web browsers and e-commerce software are upgraded so that they can handle the slew of potential new web addresses.

I've got my slew!

A resolution on the issue is expected to be reached by the end of 2007.

Since IDN.com, .net, .jp, etc. works now, I guess the "resolution" they're talking about would be for IDN.IDN (perhaps DNAME)?