[UA-Tech] BIUWG action item for Tech and Measurement WGs

[John Levine]

It appears that Seda Akbulut via UA-Tech <seda.akbulut at icann.org> said:
>Background information about the BIUWG and UASG meeting:
>BIUWG raised that IDN variant TLDs may have an impact on UA and asked if UASG is considering it?

Experience tells us that the answer is no.

>  1.  Is there any points in the DNS ecosystem that needs variant domain names to be ‘merged’? ...

>From a technical point of view, there is no such thing as variants.
They're just different domain names.  At a semantic level, people want
variants to be treated the same, but nobody has ever been able to
explain what "the same" means here.

It is not very hard to have a DNS provisioning system make two names
equivalent, and to install matching contents in the zones. I've done
it for my users who have multiple names that they want to act
similarly.  That's not a problem that needs to be solved.

It would also not be very hard to set up web and mail configurations
to tell the server that domains B, C, and D are the same as A. Web
requests for URLs in B, C, and D would do the same thing as requests
for URLs in A, or so mail to xxx at B, xxx at C, xxx at D go to the same place
as xxx at A. But you know what? Nobody has ever done it because NOBODY
CARES. The market has spoken and told us that there is no demand for
variant names.

The closest we've had to 2LD variants was .NGO and .ONG which were
until recently sold as a bundle, and everyone who had one also had the
other. I went through the zone files one time to see how many of them
had configured their web and mail servers to respond consistently to
both. One provider did, everyone else did one or the other but not
both. The .CAT registry used to provision accented and unaccented
versions of names with a DNAME, so that www.ABC.cat and www.abc.cat
pointed to the same place, where ABC and abc are accented and
unaccented versions of the name. Again I looked to see how many people
made their web servers respond consistently, and found that nobody
did.

I would suggest we direct our efforts elsewhere, to topics that people
do care about.

R's,
John