[UA-discuss] GNSO requested deferral of IDN Guidelines 4.0 Vote - CPH / Registrants impact

[Jothan Frakes]

[speaking entirely in a personal capacity here]

I strongly recommend that attention needs to be put towards how the
registrants, as well as the provider channel are impacted, especially with
respect to the impact on second level (or deeper) registration policies,
and this not be trivialized.

Confidence and Trust are a large component of attracting better adoption
and driving forward UA projects.

The user journey of a registrant needs a lot of consideration here.  Also,
commercially interested parties like registrars get to have very
uncomfortable interaction with registrants who suddenly may have a domain
that is hobbled or invalidated.  Software developers are looking at this as
well, determining how (and if) to support IDN and UA.

I'm not sure how much of a problem this is in practice.  When I went
> through and looked at all of the IDNs in gTLDs including all the old
> ones, the number that were grandfathered was quite small, well under
> 1% of the total.


That was some helpful measurement.  Building upon this, the grandfathered
registrant-folk were probably a mix of innovators and entrepreneurs (or
both).  But the fact that they invested time and money, and have renewed
these registrations over the span of time indicates that they are
interested in the stuff we're hoping to grow adoption and acceptance of.

Hopefully, if we can get more universal acceptance/awareness in communities
that could benefit from them, the total sum of all IDN registrations we
currently have will be 1% of some future number.

My hope is that some future standard update at that point in time not break
that statistically insignificant user pool, and this is what developers, IT
management, and those who control product cycles where UA can be introduced
are considering when choosing what to have teams focus on in their
road-maps.

Anytime you change the registration policies for an existing registry,
>> you will have to figure out how to grandfather existing, delegated
>> labels (if any).
>
> The LGRs for several existing TLDS have changed, and .com and .net
> have some IDNs that predate any LGRs.  The rule seems to be that you
> can renew whatever you have forever, but if it expires and it's not
> valid under the new rule, nobody can reregister it.


Grand-fathering the registrations is one aspect of addressing these
things.  This means a registrant has the option to continue to pay for the
domain and keep using it, which is good.  The challenge comes with
standards updates that gradually (or suddenly) diminish the ability to use
that name to the level of benefit that was present at the time of
registration.

A better way to preserve confidence might be to buy them back or offer a
path to updated standards for those registrants in a way that is reasonable
and acceptable to them.

Developers and development leaders will look closely at how this is
addressed, as UA projects are harder, with more testing and QA, as well as
other specializations which introduce greater scope than other projects
that might have clearer profit/benefit or prioritization.

The manner in which we address legacy registrations will have an impact on
the success of the UA

-Jothan



On Sat, May 11, 2019 at 7:32 PM John Levine <john.levine at standcore.com>
wrote:

> In article <54666ffb-2773-97e9-10d0-f6c0d4afa8aa at ix.netcom.com> you write:
> >Anytime you change the registration policies for an existing registry,
> >you will have to figure out how to grandfather existing, delegated
> >labels (if any).
>
> The LGRs for several existing TLDS have changed, and .com and .net
> have some IDNs that predate any LGRs.  The rule seems to be that you
> can renew whatever you have forever, but if it expires and it's not
> valid under the new rule, nobody can reregister it.
>
> I'm not sure how much of a problem this is in practice.  When I went
> through and looked at all of the IDNs in gTLDs including all the old
> ones, the number that were grandfathered was quite small, well under
> 1% of the total.  By percentages it seemed to be more of a problem
> that some new TLDs aren't following their own existing rules.
>
> R's,
> John
>
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