"International Domain Names" support in KDE

[Krall, Gary]

Martin:

With regards to your questions:

>Is the IDN support as implemented by Verisign an official standard? 

Absolutely.  The SDK fully and faithfully implements, as defined in IDNs in
Applications (IDNA) RFC 3490, the following RFCs:   
Name Preparation (nameprep) RFC 3491 
String Preparation (stringprep) RFC 3454 
Encoding Scheme (punycode) RFC 3492 

>What about competing implementations?

Absolutely.  Although I am not sure in the word "competition" is correct in
this case.  Outside of our reference implementation application developers
may also review:

- GNU IDN Library (Libidn) http://www.gnu.org/software/libidn/
- JPNIC idnkit http://www.nic.ad.jp/ja/idn/idnkit/download/

>Verisign is trying to make their implementation a defacto standard (this
happened before with their certificate business, 
>they are known to have used  unfair practices) and make sure beforehand
that competition stays out?

With regards to the SDK that is being discussed in this email exchange this
is an absolutely incorrect comment.  The SDK is merely a reference
implementation designed to allow for application developers to quickly and
easily provide IDNA support to their application.  The extent to which an
application developer wishes to use the implementation is completely up to
them.

>E.g. Does Verisign have a patents on the BSD licensed or other code /
technology which is required to implement their 
>version of IDN?

Absolutely not.  This is not unique to Verisign but rather an implementation
of the standard as specified by the IETF.  There are two libraries available
one in C and the other in Java.

>Has Verisign already preregistered interesting domain names which only make
sense with their implementation of IDN? 

Absolutely not.  The SDK is being provided by the Verisign Global Registry
services which is not a Registrar but rather provides support to Registrars.
Implementation of the IDN Standard is set forth by individual Registries
under governance from the IETF.  For example, to support DENIC's IDN.de,
implementation of these standards will be required.  This is not something
unique to Verisign but rather effects all Registries which plan to offer IDN
support for their domain names.

>Are these domain names to be sold for extra high prices?

Any pricing considerations are outside both the purvey of Verisign Global
Registry services and the scope of this discussion.  Pricing for IDNs are
set by the individual Registrants and have simply nothing to do with the
implementation of standards in applications for the support thereof.

I hope this answers any questions or concerns you may have had.

Gary.