Subject: IDNA2008 Appeal Response

From: IESG Secretary <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 7 Apr 2010 14:26:06 -0700 (PDT)

The IESG received an appeal from JFC Morfin on 10 March 2010. The text
of this appeal can be found at the following URL:

http://www.ietf.org/iesg/appeal/morfin-2010-03-10.pdf

Mr. Morfin submitted an appeal accompanied by a very large amount of
supporting material. Before addressing the content of the appeal, the
IESG wants to inform the community that an appeal with such a large
amount of material is not helpful to anyone. RFC 2026 requires all
appeals to "include a detailed and specific description of the facts of
the dispute." Clearly a significant amount of time was needed to
generate the appeal and supporting material, and the overwhelming amount
of material made evaluation more difficult than necessary. Any
individual making an appeal to the IESG is strongly encouraged to
provide a clear, concise, and focused text that includes a description
of the action already taken, the reasons for the disagreement with the
action taken, and their preferred remedy.

During the community discussion of the appeal, Mr. Morfin characterized
his own appeal text as follows:

> Appeal comes in four layers.
>
> 1. 20 lines which describes the appeal.
> 2. 7 pages that document why I appeal, how, and on what.
> 3. 13 pages that present positions by different persons or authorities
> that confort my concern and the existing IETF context
> 4. annexes for those interested in particular issues. This appeal
> concerns most of the Internet architecture, the least that can be
> done is to permit serious people to consider if I am right or wrong
> without having to carry again work made by many. This also permits
> to put in public domain propositions that some might want to
> consider private for commercial or strategic development and to get
> poor quick comments to decrase hacker's interest.
>
> Anyway, my personal real purpose of this appeal is that no one can
> claim I did not report the IETF and put in public domain what they may
> further consider as a mess.

Mr. Morfin supports publication of the IDNA2008 set of documents, but
he wishes that the documents had been published along with warnings.
Specifically, Mr. Morfin believes a complementary warning to the
Internet community should have been published along with the IDNA2008
set of documents that notes the new architectural opportunities
available in IDNA2008, a warning of possible confusion until these
opportunities are properly governed, and a disclaimer indicating
IDNA2008 should not be deployed or tested until coordinated usage
documentation is produced.

Mr. Morfin supports the approval of the IDNA2008 set of documents. In
a recent email message, Mr. Morfin confirmed this position by saying,
"IDNA2008 is, firstly, an improvement in clarifying the relation between
Unicode and the Internet."

Mr. Morfin also wants the IAB, not the IESG, to issue an architectural
statement. In a recent email message, Mr. Morfin confirmed this
position by saying, "IESG should have asked IAB to explain it to
everyone."

It should be clear that the IAB is studying Internationalization. The
IETF 76 Technical Plenary was focused on this topic. An architectural
statement on Internationalization in general or IDNA2008 in particular
will be published by the IAB if and only if the IAB chooses to do so.
The IESG does not direct the work of the IAB and has no ambition to do
so.

The appeal does not suggest remedial action by the IESG, and finding no
appropriate action, the appeal is rejected. The IESG observes that the
appeal includes a plea for the Internet community to initiate some work.
To this end, Mr. Morfin should consider submitting an Internet-Draft
and then approaching an appropriate Area Director to sponsor a BOF
Session or sponsor publication of the document. Please review RFC 5434,
Considerations for Having a Successful Birds-of-a-Feather (BOF) Session,
for assistance on initiating work in the IETF.