What you are failing to understand is that the IDN gTLDs have already been sold, they are simply waiting to be implemented as IDN.IDN. The approval to do this is not going to lag the technology to do this which is still being implemented. But frankly I doubt that Left to Right script users will actually bother with the IDN.IDN variants of IDN.com.

Look at all the domainers out there who simply buy domain portfolios and stuff them with pay per click links. The (notional, only realizable when the domain is actually sold) value of that portfolio might be sky high. (And keep in mind most of the customers in these trades are domainers buying the domain off each other and then trying to resell them .. to another domainer as like as not). That bubble won't take too long to burst, whereupon the domainer who is stuck with those domains at the end will have in his hands a portfolio that's worth its actual value - that is $10 (or whatever the wholesale cost of the domain is) multiplied by the number of domains. The value of PPC or other traffic generated revenue - even with relevant sites (tea manufacturer's website translated into multiple languages say) is negligible - especially when compared to the cost of maintaining and updating the website in multiple languages.

Sorry, but the evidence clearly shows that you do not know what you are talking about. If it did, would there even be a discussion going on about IP rights at ICANN?

IP lawyers? Domainers? A very short list of "usual suspect" NGOs? Or, perhaps, the actual industries that are supposed to be buying and deploying these domains?

Contempt, yes.

Well, at least we are both being honest here to a degree, as my motivation is greed. But my justification is that not only am I not hurting anyone, unlike some of the larger corporations, but if I didn't go for that financial gain, somebody else would. However, it is a bit disingenuous to hold people in contempt for making money, but yet at the same time deny that it is actually happening.

The attempt to shed responsibility "because someone else would do it anyway" is an ethical misstep. We are each individually responsible for our actions. The same sort of thinking was common about littering streets with garbage. Thankfully in that respect in some civilized countries the attitude has changed. However, litter and clutter exist in other domains (pun intended), too. And it wastes people's time. Wasting someone's time is fractional murder, because lost time is irretrievably lost. e.g. Spammers kill people, because they incrementally steal time from a large number of people, which added up amounts for multiple individual lifetimes of productivity, family life, etc. lost. Every two hundred millions sent spam messages cost about one human life. That is a lot of lives each day! The internet makes it easy to hide one's personal responsibility through anonymity or by spreading the social impact thin enough to be superficially hard to detect, but that doesn't undo the damage.

Yes, that's right. Freedom to do what you like on the Internet as long as you are large US Corporation with huge budgets piggy backing on the IP of others. How dare you call me a Spammer. You haven't the foggiest idea what you are on about. I play by the rules. ICANN make the rules and the rest of us have to follow them. If you read the rules then you would know what you are talking about.

I haven't called you a spammer (unless you are one), I said the new domains will increase spam just like any other technology that comes along and hides from the majority of users what's going on, which is why I compared it to HTML e-mail or for that matter the variety of TinyURLs, all of which hide form plain view where the request ends up going. I know perfectly well what I'm talking about, because being among other things responsible for network security, I know how most potential threats these days come in the form of social engineering attacks, where users are tricked into clicking something by providing an innocuous looking link target. While it's already hard enough for most people to distinguish between http://www.paypal.com/some/link and http://www.paypal.com.some.link.that.is.meeeasliding.cn/and/will/empty/your/account/ the situation is getting worse with each level of confusion added. That said, playing by the rules (i.e. being legal) has nothing to do with doing something positive (i.e. being ethical). There are plenty of perfectly legal practices that are ethically abominable. Also, just because something is possible and allowed doesn't mean one has to engage in it, which is why it makes perfect sense to criticize something, even though it's allowed. e.g. it is allowed to drink yourself into oblivion, but that still doesn't mean it's a good practice or that criticizing alcoholism isn't appropriate.

You called me unethical and talked about Spam at the same time the inference was clear and it was libelous. All I have actually done is registered and kept name for five years that the rest of the World like you have said are unnecessary and a complete waste of time and money. Those same people soon will be turning around soon and calling me unethical. The problem is that I don't care too much for the opinions of hypocrites.

To conclude that "they are not generally going to be able to read the content they would access using an ASCII URL" is complete nonsense. Many globally acting company offer their web contents in multiple languages. Still, they all use ASCII URLs and they use a common entry point, which is why URLS are hierarchical and not one-shot items. e.g. http://www.apple.com/jp/ http://www.apple.com/us/ http://www.apple.com/de/ http://www.apple.com/uk/ http://www.apple.com/ru/ etc. Provide perfectly localized (to both language and geo-location) contents, yet there's no need for anything other than an GLOBALLY UNDERSTOOD ascii URL to achieve this. Further, any internationally active company in its right mind would not want to have more than one main entry point. Some have pop-up menus to allow the user to pick the language, others have maps, etc. It's easy enough. e.g. http://www.skype.com/ has a pop-up at the bottom of the page where you can pick your language, and cookies will remember that setting for you. Asus solves the matter with a map: http://www.asus.com/ and then has different (virtual?) hosts for each country, thus: http://tw.asus.com/ http://ca.asus.com/ (with a language menu for français and english) http://uk.asus.com/ etc. None of them need to create a big market for domain squatters and a new attack vector for phishers to achieve this. If anything, all these companies have to go and spend money to defensively buy even more domains to prevent impostors from stealing customers private information and business. And guess what they will do? Redirect the new URLs to their existing sites. The user lands precisely where he already goes now. Nothing gained other than needless complication and more domain squatters, spammers, and phishers. Guess for what reasons ISO country codes (or automobile country tags since times before there were computers) are in "ASCII"? Because it's simple enough to be globally understood.

Yes, and just emphasize the point, Apple has just launched the iPhone in China. Do you really think that most people in the World's biggest Mobile market even care? Most of what goes on in China is about Chinese selling to Chinese. Just ask yourself how your would feel if the situation was reverse and you were forced to enter Chinese Glyphs to Twitter?

You enter chinese text by typing IN ROMAN CHARACTERS a transliteration of the sound of the chinese glyph. (Pinying), or use some other such method. Similar with Japanese, etc. Besides, ever looked at a "chinese for chinese" web site, blog, BBS, etc? There are plenty of things they write in roman characters, because for many things it's plain more efficient. They do it every day, and it's part of their lives, much like we adoped the ARABIC numerals, or do you want to go back to doing math in roman numerals, because you want to stick to your writing system? The iPhone and wether or not people there care about it, has nothing to do with Apple's web site, but with the fact that Apple is selling a high-end product that through political interference had to be crippled (no WiFi) in a country where disposable income is low, and those with disposable income have easy access to Hong Kong where they can buy the real thing, unlocked.

To quote myself from above: "... playing by the rules (i.e. being legal) has nothing to do with doing something positive (i.e. being ethical). There are plenty of perfectly legal practices that are ethically abominable. Also, just because something is possible and allowed doesn't mean one has to engage in it, which is why it makes perfect sense to criticize something, even though it's allowed. e.g. it is allowed to drink yourself into oblivion, but that still doesn't mean it's a good practice or that criticizing alcoholism isn't appropriate." It was fairly clear that this would be passed anyway, because of the way international NGOs work. So the question is not would that change eventually become legal, the question is, should we engage in the practice. I think not.

Let me see: Average Annual Income (in China)

The average annual income per capita differs enormously between urban and rural areas. For 2003 the urban figure was RMB 8,472 (US$ 1,058) while the same figure for rural areas was RMB 2,622 (US$ 328)

6,999 yuan, or $1,024, for the high-end iPhone 3GS without a service contract. The same handset can be purchased on the gray market in Hong Kong for about $800 [and there it includes WiFi capability] [...] A sticking point for some potential iPhone buyers has been the handset's lack of Wi-Fi. The capability was left out because the Chinese government temporarily banned it in favor of a rival native offering. The ban, however, was relaxed in May, after manufacturing of the new phone began, and China Unicom hopes to have Wi-Fi in the next line of phones released before the end of the year.

This just underlines how arrogant the Americans are. There are two reasons the iPhone has been delayed so long in China. The first is that the technology on the first two versiona was so retro that Apple would just have embarrassed themselves trying to sell something the Chinese would have regarded as being too slow to use. The second is that the Chinese told Apple to get lost when they demanded a Revenue Share.

The iPhone price has little to do with arrogance. Even if Apple has 66% profit margin on the phone (and likely it's more like 40%), that would still mean that an unsubsidized phone costs w/o profit the annual income of someone living in rural China, the equivalent of a device with a base cost of $20k being sold to the US public. The reason a revenue share was envisioned was to bring down that entry barrier price to something more manageable, and the reason that was rejected was because China wants to support a variety of local companies, which of course produce much cheaper and less capable hardware. As far as the iPhone being behind the curve in technology, that's a joke. China Unicom just relatively recently rolled out its 3G network, so an iPhone 3G or 3Gs would have been wasted in China not too long ago. The fact that China is the manufacturing hub for most of the world does not say anything about it's own level of technology deployment which is much more depending on what the government feels it can comfortably control and censor. Further China pushes its population to save rather than to consume, because unlike the US it has an economy based on production rather than consumption. If you were talking about Taiwan, it would be a different story; a country truly advance in many ways, but also held back by disposable income, which makes a lot of high-tech produced and even invented there out of reach for the average Taiwanese. Going to Asia helps when making statements about that part of the world...

The original iPhones were not 3G. China was on an intermediate standard when the US was still 2G, and it now in the process of leap frogging the US. US is way behind China in the Phone market. The only reason Apple is so big in the US is the Government supported Motorola really sucks.

While a lot of spam bots are located in China, that does not mean that the actual spam originates there. Spambots in China are however convenient for spammers because it makes tracking down the culprits and legal action much more difficult. Harvesting domain registration databases for usable e-mail addresses is a long standing issue, one that domain name registrars take advantage of by *charging* people for the privilege to keep their contact info hidden. All you can do is register domains with very specific, traceable e-mail addresses, and apply very stringent filters to mail coming in on these addresses.