[gtld-tech] Specification 5 - Country names... again..

[Alexander Mayrhofer]

I've started looking at the two PDFs of country names that ICANN mandates us to reserve in Section 4.2 and 4.3 of Specification 5 of the Registry Agreement. I have a couple of comments on this:

a) I can only guess whether or not the PDFs that i use (http://unstats.un.org/unsd/geoinfo/ungegn/docs/ungegn-tech-ref-manual_M87_combined.pdf and http://unstats.un.org/unsd/geoinfo/UNGEGN/docs/26th-gegn-docs/WP/WP54_UNGEGN%20WG%20Country%20Names%20Document%202011.pdf) are the correct ones, since ICANN failed to include a reference to the documents in the Agreement. 

b) Extracting names from those documents (particularly in scripts that i'm not familiar with) is absolutely horrible, and will likely lead to interopability problems between registries.

c) The mapping of the strings required to be reserved to the actual A-Label is undefined.

Therefore, could ICANN please look into creating an reservation list covering these two requirements, and publish that list as a recommended way to implement the two requirements?

ICANN could use a tiny tiny fraction of the application fees to contract someone to create an authoritative list of names to be reserved -  Or, maybe as  a secondary option in case there should be insufficient budget, allocate resources from their "Languages Services Department"  http://blog.icann.org/2013/10/introducing-the-language-services-team/ to create this list? 

I'm sure that many members of the community would welcome this as a useful contribution to ensure a unified approach to those requirements.

thanks,

Alex Mayrhofer
Head of R&D nic.at