[vip] Suggested meta-questions to think about

[Manal Ismail]

Dear All ..
Allow me also to share my views on 'Variants' in general and thanks to Patrik for triggering this discussion on the list ..
 
I believe 'Variants' is some sort of bundling or linking a set of domain names together .. meaning that:
- delegation of one occurrence of a specific set means either delegation/activation or reservation/blocking of all other occurrences of the same set and
- I believe also release, if ever, of one occurrence of a this set would also mean release of the whole set !!! 
 
*It's worth noting here that this:
- is a personal understanding
- of Visual variants 
- from an Arabic Language background 
and I'm sure other views occur even within the Arabic Study case (as we haven't come up yet with our views as a group) ..
 
On what to do should variants occur, I believe:
1. that in case of 'Identical/exact matches' (where there is no way to differentiate without looking into the unicode assignments) there need to be some means of automatic bundling .. This would of course be from a pure security point of view where no one can afford having such occurrences activated and delegated to different registries.
 
2. whereas other cases would fall into a 'similar/confusingly similar' category where different communities may tend to have different views and where bundling would be made optional and furthermore activation would also be made optional .. and I believe 2 types of needs fall wihtin this category
2.1. community need (where activation will be requested) and
2.2. defensive registrations (where activation may or may not be requested) 
 
Hope this adds to the discussion ..
 
Kind regards
 
--Manal Ismail 
Egyptian National Telecom regulatory Authority
Egypt GAC Representative     

________________________________

من: vip-bounces at icann.org بالنيابة عن Dillon, Chris
تاريخ الإرسال: الاربعاء 22/06/2011 05:33 ص
إلى: James Seng; Patrik F?ltstr?m
نسخة: vip at icann.org
الموضوع: Re: [vip] Suggested meta-questions to think about



Dear Patrik and James,

This would indeed seem to be an elegant and practical approach.

We have a list of situations that may be referred to as "variants" and we collect examples in the wiki in as many languages as possible that fall into the situations, adding some as we go, if necessary. We hope that we end up with only a short number of situations that we officially call variants (or better some other word!).

There may be a small precedent for whether a variant should be treated as one application or two: what happened when the PRC applied for China in SC and TC under the ccTLD Fast Track?

Regards,

Chris.
==
Faculty Information Support Officer
for Arts & Humanities and Laws
Arts & Humanities Faculty Office
Andrew Huxley Building
UCL, Gower St, London WC1E 6BT
Tel 020 7679 1599 (int. 31599)
http://www.ucl.ac.uk/isd/staff/fiso/ah

________________________________________
From: vip-bounces at icann.org [vip-bounces at icann.org] on behalf of James Seng [james.seng at gmail.com]
Sent: 21 June 2011 05:59
To: Patrik F?ltstr?m
Cc: vip at icann.org
Subject: Re: [vip] Suggested meta-questions to think about

This is actually a very good list to start discussing the problem of variants.

In ICANN context, people often lapped all these layers as one and
discussed issues revolving them as one single class. And if we draw
vertical lines down, these issues could further be divided by
different etymology of the scripts, or in our case, divided into
different languages that is currently having issues.

I would strongly argue that we should strictly focus on A1 and maybe
to some extend A2 for the context of variant in our group. I hesitate
we should be dealing with anything lower than that.

2011/6/20 Patrik F?ltstr?m <patrik at frobbit.se>:
> A.1. Two characters in Unicode really are to be treated as being equivalent. I presume one could say that the Hangul SC/TC issues fall in that category.
> A.2. Two different spellings of the same word in the same script and same language, like color/colour.

In between A2 & A3, I would insert "two ways to describe the same
concept in the same script and language, like shop and mall"

> A.3. Same word in the same language in two different scripts (bulgarian)
> A.4. Same word in two different languages