The 3rd IDN Software Developer Consortium meeting was held today in San Diego (one day before the IETF meetings). The initiative while headed by Verisign aspires to become a neutral forum to facilitate collaboration and discussion in the IDN field. Even though the turn out was not overwhelming, it did include representatives from the major gTLD registries, CENTR, a couple of ccTLDs and an ICANN registrar.

After 2 previous sessions (held in Minneapolis and Seoul respectively), which was dominated by so far fruitless discussions aimed at trying to convince Microsoft to incorporate the IDN standards into their products sooner, an interesting point was raised this time as to whether the consortium really have not been successful in raising the interest in a broad "software developer" base and should perhaps first focus on its immediate enthusiasts. That is, domain registries and registrars, especially gTLDs.

Besides continuing to try to find an appropriate scope and goal for the consortium, a few interesting things were raised. One of which is an update from Verisign regarding the volume of IDN registrations in the COM and NET registries. Pat Kane of Verisign mentioned that Latin-based IDN registrations have surpassed Chinese IDN registrations in the registries, with Korean domains still exhibiting the strongest demand. Pat also mentioned that based on their commissioned study 33% of current IDN domains are now live sites. Jean-Michel Becar of GMO also added that 60% of IDNs registered through their registrar is live, although only 10% are real sites, while the others are mainly advertisement-oriented sites.

In an update on a study of the Asia market, Pat mentioned that 15 million copies of Verisign's i-Nav client was downloaded in China, however many have since been uninstalled due to various types of reasons. One rather interesting observation was that people tried to access .com domains that have not yet been registered and mistakenly thought that the plug-in was not working, and hence uninstalled the client. Other reasons mentioned include spyware worries and general distrust with plug-ins.

Yoneya-san from JPRS mentioned an interesting discussion they have had with Japanese mobile phone manufacturers, citing that the reason for not incorporating IDN functionality in their phone browsers is the relative high cost (relative to the current usage of IDN) of implementation, especially due to the requirements of Nameprep.

These anecdotal evidence seem to confirm one thing, which is that the chicken-and-egg issue clouding IDN adoption is still very hard to break.

Personally, as a self-proclaimed pioneer of the field, I sincerely hope that efforts such as these could really gather some momentum, and I am very much enthusiastic in contributing to the activities as well as all programs helping broad adoption of IDN.