Re: Specific goals

[Larry Masinter <masinter@parc.xerox.com>]

I've scanned the charter of IAHC and read through much of the
background material, and I think that nearly all of the things I've
outlined (except perhaps 'fuzzy match') are within scope.

* Trademark conflicts

This is the source of much of the contention that is the cause of the
operational problems. I think if we limit the solution space to those
possibilities that require a unique match for any domain lookup, we
cannot succeed. If there is more than one 'bass' and more than one
contender for 'bass.com' then we will have conflict. If we allow
'http://www.bass.com' to be an alias for a service that says "You've
guessed a name that is in dispute, do you want Bass Fishing Supply,
Bass Company Singapore, ...." with links to the appropriate companies,
we might have some chance of resolving the issue. Maybe we can auction
off "top bidding" in the list.

* Internationalization

I don't see where "internationalization" is out of scope for IAHC. In
fact, trying to deal with the issues of US dominance seems to be
clearly _in_ scope. However, the current repertoire of characters that
are available for domain names are inadequate for most languages
EXCEPT English. If the charter were said 'Non-US English-speaking'
instead of 'international', I'd believe that the character set issues
were out of scope.

For example, we might want to consider a new set of top level domains
where the domain names were presumed to be in Unicode UTF-8 instead of
ASCII, and where domain name resolvers might be presumed to know about
well known character equivalences (as well as just simple case
equivalence), and where duplicate registration (e.g., for both Kanji
and romaji names of Japanese companies) was routinely granted.

* Fuzzy match

I agree that this is probably out of scope, except for perhaps the
character set issues. DNS currently does a 'fuzzy match' for case
independence.

* authority

I don't mean the general issue of 'authority' but the more specific
one of authority over parts of the name space; right now there's some
informal belief that if you go to 'www.microsoft.com' you will get
something that microsoft corp has some responsibility for, and that
any extension of TLDs should retain that property.

# Integrated Directory Services (ids) WG,
# http://www.ietf.org/html.charters/ids-charter.html,
# Access, Searching and Indexing of Directories (asid) WG,
# http://www.ietf.org/html.charters/asid-charter.html
# and possibly the Common Indexing Protocol (find) WG
# http://www.ietf.org/html.charters/find-charter.html
# and Service Location Protocol (svrloc) WG,
# http://www.ietf.org/html.charters/svrloc-charter.html.

I know there are many other protocols that might be used besides DNS
for this kind of lookup, but the fact is that they are not currently
and probably do not have the right kind of properties for lookup,
distribution, replication, administration.

Larry