[vip] Types of variants: do we have consensus?

[Vladimir Shadrunov]

Dear All,

It is always useful, when working in a group, to periodically ask yourself
"why are we here", "what problem we are trying to solve", "what is supposed
to be the outcome of our work".

Why has this group been convened?

I believe we are here because there's a vague perception in the community
that there are situations when two or more TLD strings should be treated
"the same". However, there is no clear understanding as to what exactly "the
same " means, i. e. what the behaviour of these variant TLDs should be. And
here we are to remove the vagueness and better formulate the issue before
further discussion may occur in the technical and policy development groups.
Am I right capturing the mission?

Note that nothing in the above suggests what these variant TLD strings
should be and how they relate to each other.

I do appreciate the work that has been done on the definitions document.
However, I can't help noticing that this document is centred around the
concept that variant labels are the ones that are generated by means of
character-by-character substitution via Language Variant Tables (I'll refer
to them as character-based variants).

It has been already suggested by several members that variant strings can
also be based on other types of similarity/equivalence, such as:

   - *visual* (strings that have different code points, but are visually
   identical)
   - *phonetic* (strings that are written differently, but sound the same)
   - *semantic* (strings that "mean" the same, with full understanding that
   not every DNS label has a meaning. Some labels, however, do have meanings so
   "semantically equivalent TLD variant strings" doesn't at all sound
   outrageous to me).


These situations are not covered in the current definitions document and
continuing to ignore this issue may produce a wrong impression that there is
a group consensus that variant labels can only be character-based. I do not
think presense of such a consensus is the case (can easily be tested via a
poll). Don't you think having a consensus on such an important underlying
issue is important for the group?

Thanks,
Vladimir Shadrunov
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