[UA-discuss] More from Ram Mohan on ICANN's further commitment to Universal Acceptance

[Tex]

Although this thread addresses the structural difficulties of multiple domains serving one organization, the other issue is the difficulty of users verifying that these domains belong to the same owner.

Yes, it is already an issue today with for example mcdonalds wanting to own mcdonalds in each tld, ibut t becomes that much more difficult to have domains in different scripts, etc. and for users to know which ones are legitimate and which are spoofs.
It seems safer for an organization to have a singular domain than to add a few and open the door to imitators that may be hard to find and close down before they do damage to their market.

Not to mention there often isn’t a single correct transliteration or translation....

So is this thread really about: Having IDNs make sense as singular domains, but when does it make sense or not make sense to have multiple domains (IDN or otherwise)?

Tex



-----Original Message-----
From: UA-discuss [mailto:ua-discuss-bounces at icann.org] On Behalf Of John Levine
Sent: Tuesday, December 25, 2018 1:58 PM
To: ua-discuss at icann.org
Subject: Re: [UA-discuss] More from Ram Mohan on ICANN's further commitment to Universal Acceptance

In article <2eb428e5-ed29-a914-23e3-7889b427b69d at ix.netcom.com> you write:
>What about "www." being an optional subdomain?
>
>How are the techniques used to handle this different from having an IDN 
>alias?

I think it's pretty safe to assume that foo.com and www.foo.com are in
the same language, and if one redirects to the other, nobody will be
confused.  Even so, getting it to work right is not totally trivial.
The two names need their own SSL certificates, or if there's one cert
it has to be validated for both names.  If the site uses cookies as
most do to manage site logins or user options, it has to be sure the
cookies for the two names are kept in sync or all forced to one of the
names.

None of this is terribly hard, but it's not automatic either.

>Yes, I did note the passage on language negotiation, but how is that 
>different from sites that can be accessed via ccTLDs in addition to a 
>domain name in a gTLD. That's a pattern typical for many global 
>organizations.

Same answer, except that if one name isn't a subdomain of the other,
the login and option cookie problems are a lot harder.

>How are any of these issues materially different from offering your site 
>with multiple localized names?

The point, which I apparently wrongly thought was obvious, is that none
of this multi-name stuff works automatically, and telling people "just
add a bunch of IDN names and EAI addresses" is not going to end well.

R's,
John

PS:

>PS: some non-European scripts can have variants that work similar to 
>case-equivalence. If you want to institute loose matching of e-mail 
>usernames based on them, you'd have to roll your own -

Yes, people who are working about EAI are aware of the way that local
part matching works.  Since every mail system already has its own
loose matching rules, it's not a new problem but it's not one that
anyone has thought much about for EAI mail addresses.  I can
definitely tell you that without loose address matching that matches
user expectations, whatever they are, your customers will hate you and
decide that your system is unusable.