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

[Roberto Gaetano]

For sure, if I were an IDN registrant and experienced rejection of my domain name (or email address) by some application because all of a sudden it becomes a “forbidden” variant, I would be seriously annoyed.
It is true that the affected domain names are probably a rounding error compared to the hundreds of millions domain names, but it would nevertheless (further) reduce confidence in IDNs - and this is something that we really do not need.
Cheers,
Roberto


On 13.05.2019, at 07:25, Jothan Frakes <jothan at jothan.com<mailto:jothan at jothan.com>> wrote:

[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<mailto:john.levine at standcore.com>> wrote:
In article <54666ffb-2773-97e9-10d0-f6c0d4afa8aa at ix.netcom.com<mailto: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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