[UA-discuss] Fw: Re: IDN Implementation Guidelines [RE: Re : And now about phishing...]

[Andrew Sullivan]

On Sat, Apr 22, 2017 at 01:32:08PM +0000, nalini.elkins at insidethestack.com wrote> 
> For example, you may wish to see the following permutations which have already been obtained.  (And, it appears not by Apple)
> 
> www.applé.com   www.xn--appl-epa.com   www.xn--appl-epa.com	 
> www.applê.com   www.xn--appl-jpa.com    www.xn--appl-jpa.com	 
> www.applė.com   www.xn--appl-yva.com   www.xn--appl-yva.com	 
> www.applę.com   www.xn--appl-8va.com   www.xn--appl-8va.com

Do you think that those qualify as "homographs"?  I suppose they
might, as might àpple.com and so on, but these at least don't seem to
me to be any different than app1e.com, which we decided long ago was
Apple's problem and nobody else's. 

This is quite different to the case of true homoglyphs of the sort
that Asmus is talking about, where the very same glyph is normally
used in two different scripts such that nobody would be able to tell
the difference.  One maybe could argue that "аррӏе" is pure homoglyphs
(0430,0440,0440,04CF, 0435), but I think it's tough to argue for it.

Remember, the IDNA rules are really _quite_ restrictive, and if
registries also require "same script per label" those restrictions
catch an _awful_ lot of corner cases (that was the outcome of the
"paypal" controversy some time ago).

If you want to argue that policy should be different, that's fine, but
it seems to me to require some PDP within ICANN.  Note that ICANN is
probably going to propose some rules for variant handling, and
combined with the LGR stuff that is working its way through the system
we may find an awful lot of stuff is blocked.

In any case, I think our purpose is very badly served by conflating
these two different kinds of issues.

Best regards,

A

-- 
Andrew Sullivan
ajs at anvilwalrusden.com