[vip] Educational session on existing variant practices

Tue Jul 5 10:20:27 UTC 2011

Hi Vladimir and all,

I have been discussing for quite a long period with the DNSEXT group of the
IETF because (in my opinion) an xNAME solution is necessary in many cases
for a good user experience of the IDN Variants. That discussion has not
finished but it hasn't progressed significantly since the SF Icann meeting.
I fully support your proposal about the presentation, since many are unaware
of the difficulties of administering multiple TLDs (when they should perform
as one) while trying to help the user minimize his costs and troubles.

I believe Andrew could tell us what the present situation of the xNAME
discussion is. I had to take some unavoidable time of absence lately and I
am a little uninformed since so please forgive me for not giving you a clear
picture of the current status of this issue.

Kind Regards,

Vaggelis Segredakis

  _____  

From: vip-bounces at icann.org [mailto:vip-bounces at icann.org] On Behalf Of
Vladimir Shadrunov
Sent: Tuesday, July 05, 2011 12:07 PM
To: vip at icann.org
Subject: Re: [vip] Educational session on existing variant practices

Hi Andrew and thanks for your comment. 

I perfectly understand your points. However, I heard a number of times that
DNAME or some other xNAME may be part of the solution for the problem we are
trying to define. There may be members of this group who do not know well
what DNAME is and I think a 5-10 minute presentation may fill this gap. 

With regards to the work of IETF there are RFCs that consider variants and
string similarity, at least for Chinese and Cyrillic scripts. I believe this
is very relevant to the work of this group and as these are finished work
products I believe it may be useful for the group to learn if the variant
issues were defined and dealt with in these RFCs. 

Best regards,
Vladimir Shadrunov

On 4 July 2011 22:03, Andrew Sullivan <ajs at anvilwalrusden.com> wrote:

Dear colleagues,

I think this is an excellent suggestion worthy of pursuit.  I have one
remark, however.

On Mon, Jul 04, 2011 at 11:04:07AM +0100, Vladimir Shadrunov wrote:

> If someone active in the IETF community would be willing to give a
> presentation on how existing DNS standards and related RFC handle string
> similarity that would also be great. Additionally some feedback from the
IP
> lawyers would be appreciated as to whether the variant problem exists in
the
> IP realm.

I can certainly provide an overview of how various DNS technologies
can be used to help with label-string similarity issues.  There are
some tricks one can use in the DNS that make some of these issues in
some ways easier, and in some ways trickier, to deal with.

But the short answer to the question as phrased above is much more
blunt, and I want to put it here on the list so that it is not lost.
The existing DNS standards and related RFCs do nothing at all about
string similarity.  DNS is an exact-match technology.  You send a
query for a QNAME, QCLASS, and QTYPE.  If there is an entry in the
authoritative name server you happen to talk to, or some in
intermediate cache, that matches _exactly_ your requested combination,
you get back an answer.  If there is the same name but something else
doesn't match, you get back an empty answer with no error (or,
sometimes, a redirection).  And if there is no such name in the
authoritative servers, you get back "NXDOMAIN" (that is, RCODE=3 Name
Error).

This is a deep and fundamental part of the DNS, and it is important we
not lose sight of it; it is not something we can change without
effectively replacing the DNS itself.  Anything that we cannot
ultimately simulate by adding to the number of exact matches in the
global DNS -- that is, making the DNS bigger -- is just not a policy
that can ever be deployed.

Best regards,

A

--
Andrew Sullivan
ajs at anvilwalrusden.com

-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://mm.icann.org/pipermail/vip/attachments/20110705/7696162a/attachment-0001.html 