RE: [gnso-contactinfo-pdp-wg] Re: Translation and Transliteration of Contact Information PDP Working Group Thursday 30 October 2014 / some further comments/questions, etc

["Tan Tanaka, Dennis" <dtantanaka@xxxxxxxxxxxx>]

In regards this statement “Registries and Registrars are encouraged to only use 
 US-ASCII encoding and character repertoire for WHOIS port 43 output.”. The 
paragraph from ICANN advisory notes on Sep 12 states:

As described in RFC 3912, the WHOIS protocol (port-43) has not been 
internationalized. While a substitute protocol is being developed in the IETF, 
Registries and Registrars are encouraged to only use US-ASCII encoding and 
character repertoire for WHOIS (port-43) output. If the 
RegistryOperator/Registrar uses characters outside of the US-ASCII repertoire, 
the output MUST be encoded in UTF-8 to maximize the chances of interoperability.
Although iCANN encourages use of US-ASCII it does not exclude the use of other 
characters sets as long as they are encoded in UTF-8.

From: owner-gnso-contactinfo-pdp-wg@xxxxxxxxx 
[mailto:owner-gnso-contactinfo-pdp-wg@xxxxxxxxx] On Behalf Of Petter Rindforth
Sent: Wednesday, November 12, 2014 6:41 PM
To: Emily Taylor
Cc: gnso-contactinfo-pdp-wg@xxxxxxxxx
Subject: Re: [gnso-contactinfo-pdp-wg] Re: Translation and Transliteration of 
Contact Information PDP Working Group Thursday 30 October 2014 / some further 
comments/questions, etc

Thanks, Emily.

I'll have a meeting within 20 min from now to further discuss this topic (at 
INTA).

Best,
Petter

--
Petter Rindforth, LL M

Fenix Legal KB
Stureplan 4c, 4tr
114 35 Stockholm
Sweden
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Direct phone: +46(0)702-369360
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Thank you

11 november 2014, Emily Taylor 
<emily.taylor@xxxxxxxxxxxxx<mailto:emily.taylor@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>> skrev:
Dear Petter

Thank you for your message, and apologies for the delay in responding to your 
points.


I wanted to address the claim that because contracted parties had not made 
noises about ICANN’s advisory they must be okay with it. I’ve attached a letter 
that I'm informed was provided by the RySG to ICANN staff as a result of the 
RySG being provided an early version of the advisor for comment. I understand 
that none of these comments were taken into account by ICANN when they 
published the advisory and despite being asked why, I don’t believe any answer 
was forthcoming.



In short, there have been expressions of concern over the recent advisory, and 
my understanding from discussions on the RrSG list is that many have concerns 
over transliteration and translation of WHOIS data.



Kind regards



Emily

On 30 October 2014 13:20, Petter Rindforth 
<petter.rindforth@xxxxxxxxxxxxx<mailto:petter.rindforth@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>> wrote:

Dear All,

Just a last minute summary of
Some further comments/questions/inputs/suggestions:

(collected from the IP point of view)



Note that ICANN issued an advisory last month clarifying technical aspects of 
provisions of the 2013 RAA and new gTLD Registry Agreement regarding uniform 
requirements for presenting Whois data.   
https://www.icann.org/resources/pages/registry-agreement-spec4-raa-rdds-2014-09-12-en
 .  Significantly , it states that  “Registries and Registrars are encouraged 
to only use  US-ASCII encoding and character repertoire for WHOIS port 43 
output.”  The purpose is to facilitate parsing of Whois data by automated tools 
such as ICANN’s centralized Whois data portal, http://whois.icann.org/ .  
Similar arguments would apply to facilitating machine translation.



Thus the status quo is (or will be, by February 2015) that contracted parties 
are at least “encouraged” to transliterate into ASCII if Whois data is 
submitted in some other script.

Has anyone heard any howls of outrage from registries and registrars over this?

The advisory also states” All domain name labels in the values of any of the 
fields described in section 1.4.2 of the 2013 RAA, and sections 1.5, 1.6, and 
1.7 of Specification 4 of the Registry Agreement (e.g., Domain Name, Name 
Server, email) MUST be shown in ASCII-compatible form (A-Label).



For example, a name server with an IDN label should be shown as:

Name Server: ns1.xn--caf-dma.example.”



The referenced fields include virtually all the registrant data we are 
concerned with.  See the listing in section 1.4.2 of Specification 3 of the 
2013 RAA, 
https://www.icann.org/resources/pages/approved-with-specs-2013-09-17-en .

I’m not certain whether this ASCII requirement applies only to the labels 
(e.g., “Name Server”) or to the content following the label --- the example 
given suggests the latter—which further solidifies the idea that contracted 
parties are already required to transliterate Whois data into ASCII.  But I 
could be misreading this requirement.



§§§



·         "I think it would be useful to suggest the requirement that all Whois 
text be machine-readable text. I’m not sure if that’s already a recommendation 
of the EWG report, but as one can imagine, the Whois systems that substitute 
graphics for the e-mail (which, for all we know, could spread to other fields) 
would stymie attempts at automated translation by users of Whois.



·         Does anyone have any ideas for avoiding flight by bad actors to the 
least translatable languages? One idea would be to require:



·        Whois info to be in either the language of the registrar or registrant 
(i.e. can’t pick some random language just to make it hard to translate), and



·        translation or transliteration is required if it’s not in a) Latin 
characters, b) one of the six U.N. languages, or c) possibly some larger but 
reasonable set of well-known and widely translatable languages (say, 20 or so)."

--
Petter Rindforth, LL M

Fenix Legal KB
Stureplan 4c, 4tr
114 35 Stockholm
Sweden
Fax: +46(0)8-4631010<tel:%2B46%280%298-4631010>
Direct phone: +46(0)702-369360
E-mail: petter.rindforth@xxxxxxxxxxxxx<mailto:petter.rindforth@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
www.fenixlegal.eu<http://www.fenixlegal.eu>


NOTICE
This e-mail message is intended solely for the individual or individuals to 
whom it is addressed. It may contain confidential attorney-client privileged 
information and attorney work product. If the reader of this message is not the 
intended recipient, you are requested not to read, copy or distribute it or any 
of the information it contains. Please delete it immediately and notify us by 
return e-mail.
Fenix Legal KB, Sweden, www.fenixlegal.eu<http://www.fenixlegal.eu>
Thank you

--

Emily Taylor

MA(Cantab), MBA
Director

Netistrar Ltd - Domain Names at Trade Prices
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