[vip] Suggested meta-questions to think about

[Andrew Sullivan]

Hi Daniel,

Thanks for your response.  Since ICANN has engaged me as a resident
technical guy, I'm going to respond with that (somewhat geeky) hat.

On Sat, Jun 25, 2011 at 06:47:34AM +0300, Daniel Kalchev wrote:
> 
> ICANN is just preparing to enter the "registry business" with the
> introduction of the new gTLDs.

I want to distinguish between "being a registry" and "the registry
business".  In the DNS world, where I come from, everyone who operates
a zone and performs delegations from it is "a registry".  It's
possible to be a registry for some.strange.domain.name.example, even
though you'll probably never make any money at it.  That ICANN is
charging amounts of money for entries in the root zone and so on is
important from a business/legal/political point of view, but it does
not directly impinge on the techno-policy implications of that
decision.  In my (personal) view, we are charged with providing
guidance about that techno-policy only.  I have my own views about the
wisdom of expanding the TLD space; but given that it is happening,
what are the issues that need to be addressed?  We are tasked, as I
understand it, with addressing one of the latter types of issues.  If
I am misunderstanding, I'm sure others will correct me.

> The DNS is designed in such a way, that uniform technical rules
> apply to any label at any level in the hierarchy. 

That is only sort of true, and it is not much true at all for
registration policies.  For instance, many people do not realise that
there is no strict technical restriction at all of what eight bit
octet you can put in your zone.  DNS labels are made of octets.  If
you want, in your zone, to put any series of bits you like in there,
you can do so.  This means that you could just plop UTF-8 directly
into the zone; and some people have done this.  But, the RFCs (STD 13)
also say that it would be better to stick to the hostname rules
("letter, digit, hyphen").  So, in the TLD space, we have mostly stuck
to this, for maximum interoperability on the Internet.  The closer you
are to the root, the more conservative you need to be, since things
will break otherwise.  But there are plenty of labels lower in the
tree that don't follow that.  No TLD of which I am aware, for
instance, permits "underscore labels" (_example.example.com).  But
they're not only legal, they're important for the functioning of
things like Apple's Bonjour, DKIM, and so 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.

For the sake of argument, let me grant that variants are label based
and language specific.  (I've on purpose left aside "word" because
it's a disaster: "ns1" is a perfectly viable DNS label, but it is not
a word in any language as far as I know.  For that matter, "com" is a
perfectly viable label, but it's not a word in English, even though
people keep insisting it is.  And as soon as we start talking about
words, we have the problems of neologisms and trademarks -- neither of
which are in any dictionary except in very unusual cases -- as well as
the problem of which dictionary to pick.)  Now, suppose you receive a
DNS registration request for "monaco.example".  Does it have a
variant?  Well, if you're Italian targetting a German market, the
answer is, "Yes".

We don't have an "intention bit" that comes with attempted DNS
registrations -- never mind DNS lookups, on which I haven't touched in
the above example.  This makes the situation terribly complex, and it
is why, in the absence of a complete proposal for how a label-wide
variant system would work, I have been arguing we shouldn't go down
that path.  If, however, you have a proposal for how a complete
label-based variant system might work, I would be very keen to review
it; and I would enthusiastically contribute to its development if it
seemed viable.  Until I see such a proposal, however, I remain very
sceptical that it is possible except in the most constrained
environments.  And since gTLDs are by definition not constrained
environments, I am worried about any suggestion that we ought to work
label by label.

Best regards,

Andrew
-- 
Andrew Sullivan
ajs at anvilwalrusden.com