Dr. John C. Klensin is now an independent consultant following a distinguished career as Internet Architecture Vice President at AT&T, Distinguished Engineering Fellow at MCI WorldCom, and Principal Research Scientist at MIT.
He served on the Internet Architecture Board from 1996-2002 and was its Chair from 2000 until the end of his term. Earlier, he served as IETF Area Director for Applications and was Chair, Co-chair, and/or Editor for IETF Working Groups focused on messaging and IETF process issues.
He was involved in the early procedural and definitional work for DNS administration and top-level domain definitions and was part of the committee that worked out the transition of DNS-related responsibilities between USC-ISI and what became ICANN. He participated actively in a number of efforts to expand internationalization of the Internet, ranging from early character set requirements work, through the efforts to permit and identify non-ASCII character sets in email, and including IDN efforts in the IETF, ICANN, and elsewhere.
He was also involved in the design and development of the Internet’s email system from its beginnings, and has been heavily involved in internationalization issues, for the Internet and in other areas, for many years.
A paper by Dr. John C. Klensin, former Vice President of Internet Architecture at AT&T, a Distinguished Engineering Fellow at MCI WorldCom, and Principal Research Scientist at MIT. This paper has been reproduced with kind permission from the Internet Society. "Over the last few years, rising interest in internationalized domain names has been accompanied by interest in using those names at the top level and, in particular, replacing or supplementing country-code based domain names with names in the language of the relevant countries. This memo suggests that actually creating such names in the DNS is undesirable from both a user-interface and DNS management standpoint. It then proposes the alternative of translating the names so that every TLD name is available to users in their own languages." more