[vip] Suggested meta-questions to think about

[Daniel Kalchev]

On Jun 24, 2011, at 18:15 , Andrew Sullivan wrote:

> Now, ICANN is in effect the registry (or at least the registry
> policy-holder) for the root zone: it is the technical co-ordination
> body that publishes the policies for the root zone.  Those policies
> are developed in various ways inside the ICANN processes; how is not
> that important for our task.  (Please note that this is not a claim of
> ICANN authority over the root zone, to impinge on the authority of
> sovereigns or the independence of the root operators, or any other
> such controversial claim.)

ICANN is just preparing to enter the "registry business" with the introduction of the new gTLDs. This makes ICANNs decisions and implementation to what is a variant and what is not comparable with that of any other registry.

The DNS is designed in such a way, that uniform technical rules apply to any label at any level in the hierarchy. Therefore, the community will benefit best from our work, if we come up with an agreed and understood "standard" of what variants are, what they are not and how are (or will be) implemented in the todays world of non-ASCII DNS.

I do understand, that ICANN (staff, board) needs fast answers to just few questions in order to proceed with the new gTLD launch, but there are other processes/parties that can benefit from this work, such as the ccNSO IDN PDP, as well as each and every DNS registry from now on.

>From what we have so far, there seems to be strong opinion, that variants should be considered character based and script specific. I will again voice my opinion, that variants are label (word) based and language specific. Or even go as far to suggest sometimes they are community or region specific.

Some languages might be simplified enough to use character/script variants -- look at how "good" Latin got translated into ASCII. But my  belief is, that todays computers and software are not that primitive, so that we should make such sacrifices for the same of simplicity.

Daniel Kalchev
Register.BG