kijeda

Counter examples: In London I'll take the Heathrow Express over the alternatives because it is a much more compelling option to get to downtown London. Recently in Johannesburg the airport rail took me to the airport in 14 minutes where as a car would take 90 minutes in commuter traffic. In Germany, I've seen people commute half way across the country every day on high-speed rail because it opened up opportunities to work that didn't exist before.

The thing to bear in mind is this standard is used for a number of different purposes historically that has informed territories and other "non"-countries being added.

For example, it is used by postal services for routing physical mail. A lot of far flung island dependencies are coded individually because their mail wouldn't route through their mother country but through other ports.

The addition of "EU", while not a country, reflected the needs of the "EUR" currency code when the Euro was introduced (the first two letters of ISO 4217 currency codes are derived from the ISO 3166-1 standard).

There is also another service called WPS for cell phones where you get priority just by prefixing your number with *272, the only catch there is your specific phone needs to be enrolled.

"Finding 1: Emoji are disallowed by the IDNA standard; domain names with emoji will not be accepted or processed consistently by applications.

Finding 2: Emoji are not required by design, standard, or convention to be visually uniform (one code point displayed the same way in all circumstances) or visually distinguishable (different code points displayed in ways that permit them to be disambiguated regardless of context). As a result, a user will be exposed to problems of confusability and accessibility. Different code points that are rendered the same or one code point that renders differently to different users will lead to inconsistent results depending on the display or rendering technology used.

Finding 3: Emoji modifiers and “glue” arrangements allow for a potentially much larger set of composed multi-codepoint symbols with even greater rendering variation and potential for ambiguous interpretation.

Finding 4: A fundamental property of the DNS is that it is an exact-match lookup service. For a given query, either there is a single name that matches or there is no match. When two domain names are identical in appearance except for ordinary typographic style variations (which, at present, have no equivalent for emoji), but have different underlying code points, they identify two different DNS domains.

Finding 5: It is unrealistic to expect that just because a code point is included in Unicode, it should be used as part of a domain name."

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/monkey-cage/wp/2017/03/2...

There have been others come to light since, but this was two weeks ago.

IDNs will take years to be pervasive, just like Unicode before it, because it is a painful upgrade to something designed in a different era. It doesn't mean the endeavour isn't worthwhile.

It is already supported for IP address lookups by all 5 regional Internet registries.

"From its origins as a U.S.-based research vehicle, the Internet is rapidly becoming an international medium for commerce, education and communication. The traditional means of organizing its technical functions need to evolve as well. The pressures for change are coming from many different quarters:

* There is widespread dissatisfaction about the absence of competition in domain name registration.

* Conflicts between trademark holders and domain name holders are becoming more common. Mechanisms for resolving these conflicts are expensive and cumbersome.

* Many commercial interests, staking their future on the successful growth of the Internet, are calling for a more formal and robust management structure.

* An increasing percentage of Internet users reside outside of the U.S., and those stakeholders want to participate in Internet coordination.

* As Internet names increasingly have commercial value, the decision to add new top-level domains cannot be made on an ad hoc basis by entities or individuals that are not formally accountable to the Internet community.

* As the Internet becomes commercial, it becomes less appropriate for U.S. research agencies to direct and fund these functions."

Someone has to do that job for it to all work. Do the managers of the hundreds of TLDs around the world contact you to update your version? No, they send them to IANA.

The IANA's job is simply to be the authoritative repository of unique identifiers and associated configuration data — TLDs, IP addresses, port numbers, MIME types, etc. You are free to use your own bespoke IP addressing scheme, port numbers and MIME types too, but don't expect to be able interoperate with anyone else.

In addition, ICANN the organization will have new accountability measures that will allow the community to challenge decisions it makes. It provides new powers like spilling its Board under certain circumstances.

One of the main drivers to change the current setup is NTIA's role above is seen as undue US government influence in what should be a purely technical operation by many. Over the years some have advocated fundamentally altering how ICANN works (like moving it to the UN) because of the US Government's influence. By transferring the primary oversight role to the multi-stakeholder community (users, business, non-profits, etc.) who have always really driven ICANN's decisions anyway, it is hoped that that criticism will go away and pressure to fundamentally alter how it works will dissipate.

Despite the folklore around these ceremonies that there are 7 people with "the keys to the Internet", those seven only retain a metal key that is used to access a safety deposit box in the ICANN/IANA facility, each of which contains a smart card of which there is an "m-of-n" configuration to activate HSMs containing the actual key.

One school of thought is to migrate DNSSEC from relying on validating resolvers sitting within the network provider, and moving it closer to the edge, in web browsers and so forth. Not much of that has happened to date.