Re: New Internet Draft on registering IDNs

[Paul Hoffman / IMC <phoffman@xxxxxxx>]

A followup on my own message, because I believe what I said was wrong. I said:

> Either the system is automatic (no human intervention) and can 
> create many unnecessary alternatives, or it is human-controlled and 
> error-prone.

That's too simplistic. Human-controlled systems that decide what is 
and is not a variant are error-prone, but human-controlled systems 
that decide which labels from an automatically-created bundle are 
not. This ties into Vint's suggestion the other day about 
non-automatic partitioning the labels in the bundle between allocated 
and blocked. In this scenario, the registry can say many different 
things, such as "your bundle contains 1024 entries, and..."

- you can choose which five to put in the zone; the other 1019 will be blocked
- we have chosen the five that we will put in the zone, and the 1019 
that will be blocked
- you can put as many as you want in the zone, and it will cost you 
US$10 per name per year to do so; the rest will be blocked for free
- because your bundle has 1024 names, the base bundle cost is five 
times higher than if you had chosen a name that only had 128 names; 
plus, you must pay...

... and so on.

I will cover this additional scenario in my next draft.

More comments on this are welcome!

--Paul Hoffman, Director
--Internet Mail Consortium