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ICANN's proposed changes to IDN registration

A month ago, ICANN announced that it had a large set of proposed changes to its "Guidelines for the Implementation of Internationalized Domain Names". The original guidelines are fairly confusing and not widely deployed by the ccTLDs, so one would think that the proposed revisions would be clearer and more useful.

No such luck. Instead of describing what the problems with the old guidelines were, the committee that put together the new proposal simply added a whole bunch more rules. Note that there was never any written notice that the new guidelines were being considered. Thus, when they asked the community to comment on their new proposal, they were hit with a wide variety of criticism.

Bret Fausett and I posted a message listing our five major concerns. In brief:

1. The proposal would benefit greatly from a statement of purpose
2. The proposal is titled "Guidelines," but it contains many statements about what a registry must and must not do
3. Version 1 of the guidelines has been in existence for two years, but ICANN has not published a report on the successes and failures in version 1
4. The proposed revisions do not have a list of the changes between versions and why each was made
5. The proposal includes a mandatory obligation on TLD registries to participate in a loose and undefined "collaboration" with other entities

In other words, lots of new rules with no apparent enforceability, and no explanation about what the purpose is or why the previous rules were not good enough.

The result of this effort would not have been so bad if the parties had been more open about what they were doing. Instead, it was created by a subcommittee of a committee that doesn't appear to exist, at least from searching the ICANN web pages. It was created without asking the IETF for input, and thus resulting in the message from the IAB that points out a serious technical flaw. The group also didn't ask the Unicode Consortium for input, even though that group knows more about internationalization than anyone else, thus resulting in a message from them pointing out even more errors in the proposal.

On the other hand, since it is phenomenally unlikely that these rules will ever be enforced, the fact that the are confused and technically flawed may not be all that important. What is important is that ICANN has, yet again, failed to follow its own guidelines about openness, about limiting its scope of control, and about working with outside bodies. And yet, folks like Bret still think that ICANN would be better than a take-over by the UN; I remain unconvinced.

Hard drive price point

The new Seagate Barracuda 7200.9 500BG hard drives are out, and the mail order places have them for under $400. For those of us who have filled up two 200GB drives with backups and music, this is a very nice alternative. It's amazing that new top-end drives are coming out at under $1/GB.

Soulful protest

I just got an amazing show off of Dime A Dozen. "For What It's Worth" is a standard protest song, mostly done by righteous young white folks. But when the Staple Singers get their hands on the song (MP3), it goes completely different places. This is from a live show on 4/19/68 (but it may be a combination of shows). The set list winds around from gospel to protest to folk, but there is a common stream through all of them.

1) See That My Grave Is Kept Clean 
2) Will the Circle Be Unbroken 
3) Freedom Highway 
4) For What It's Worth 
5) John Brown 
6) If I Had a Hammer 
7) Move Along Train 
8) Are You Sure 
9) Help Me Jesus 
10) Tramp on the Street 
11) Freedom Highway 
12) Move Along Train 
13) A Hard Rain's A-Gonna Fall 
14) For What It's Worth 
15) Stand by Me 
16) Help Me Jesus 

The call-and-response on "Hard Rain" is also quite wonderful. Let me know if you want a copy of the show.

Humorous but not useful search replies

I'm second-hand blogging for my mother here. She just called, laughing about the answers one gets from the internet. She is a docent at a local historic cemetery in Santa Cruz, and thus will spend the rest of October giving tours that involve talking about ghosts. To get a bit of background info, she went to Ask Jeeves and asked "What is a ghost?". The first reply is What is GHOST? It stands for "General Hardware Oriented System Transfer" and it is a utility program that Symantec purchased a few years back.

For what it's worth, Google does only marginally better, with the top site being ghost-related, and the next one a (different) nerd reference, followed by the Symantec program, followed by another nerd reference, and then another Symantec reference.