[UA-discuss] GNSO requested deferral of IDN Guidelines 4.0 Vote - CPH / Registrants impact

[John Levine]

On Sun, 12 May 2019, Jothan Frakes wrote:
> That was some helpful measurement.  Building upon this, the grandfathered
> registrant-folk were probably a mix of innovators and entrepreneurs (or
> both).  But the fact that they invested time and money, and have renewed
> these registrations over the span of time indicates that they are
> interested in the stuff we're hoping to grow adoption and acceptance of.

Actually, all of the grandfathered stuff I saw was junk.  It has 
characters like degree and euro signs and punctuation.  I spot checked a 
bunch of them to see if they resolved and all of the ones that did went to 
a generic parking or for sale page.

The most notable change has been that the ß eszett is now allowed in 
German names.  There are some active web sites with ß names and I agree it 
would be bad if they stopped working (keeping in mind that some browsers 
still use old IDNA2003 mappings so there are browsers where they don't 
work now.)

Not wearing my UA hat this tells me that it continues to be a bad idea to 
have live variant names in the DNS as opposed to delegating one and 
blocking the rest.  If it wasn't active in the first place, you can't 
break it.

Regards,
John Levine, john.levine at standcore.com
Standcore LLC