Correct IDN string for Russia
WE PREVIOUSLY POSTED USING CYRILLIC CHARACTERS WHERE APPROPRIATE, TO ILLUSTRATE CLEARLY THE SITUATION. THIS PAGE ON ICANN'S SITE DOES NOT SUPPORT CYRILLIC CHARACTERS. SO WE HAVE HAD TO CONVERT OUR COMMENTS, ELIMINATING THE CYRILLIC AND USING ONLY ROMAN CHARACTERS, AS BELOW. To the ICANN CEO and to the Request to Provide Input on Introduction of IDN ccTLDs: We must select the correct IDN string for Russia to use in its ccTLD. That is the Cyrillic string .py. Historically over thousands of years, Russians have proudly used a single name for their country, in Cyrillic of course. And pronunciation of the country name in Russian - "ROOS" - is similar to the way one pronounces "Russia" in English and also generally around the world. To date the ASCII ccTLD designated by ICANN for Russia, based on ISO 3166-1, and used by Russians for more than a decade, is the string ".ru". This is naturally pronounced "ROO" by all Russians, as in "kangaROO". The Cyrillic string ".py", being a natural shortening of the country name pronounced "ROOS", is also pronounced "ROO". Thus for more than a decade, Russian Internet users have always pronounced the ending of every domestic web-site as "dot ROO". And they have named the Russian segment of the Internet "ROO-net". In virtually all conversation, writings, advertisements and billboards, all over the nation, the transliteration/translation of any web-site identifier or of an email address has been ".py" - the Cyrillic that is pronounced "ROO". This has incurred billions of rubles spent over decades and has become ingrained in use by the 25 million Russian Internet users and the 250 million Russian population at large. To a Russian speaker it is unthinkable that any ICANN-designated IDN TLD intended for the country Russia be anything other than ".py". That is simply unthinkable. Moreover, the Cyrillic ".py" - now for long years - has in fact already become firmly entrenched in Russian use of the Internet. ICANN showed no interest in addressing the needs of IDN worldwide when the IDN technology was widely available and tested in Asia, from 1999. In Russia - as in similar indigenous launches in China, Arabia and elsewhere - an indigenous IDN TLD Cyrillic ".py" launched several years ago. That Cyrillic ".py" has been successfully operational since then. The many facets of Russia's Internet community have supported it. That includes most Registrars and Resellers, and many ISPs are supporting. For example the dominant national Cybercafe chain, with thousands of outlets, has supported it for over five years. With many thousands of names registered, Cyrillic ".py" also enjoys widespread media support. Most significantly, corporations and other institutions have registered these ".py" domains and have been including them in their advertising campaigns for years. The deployed technology follows the IDNA standard, recommended by IETF since 2003 and approved by ICANN. Critically and very responsibly, Russia has taken the conservative approach of registering ONLY Cyrillic characters in front of its Cyrillic ".py". Now, ICANN in the past year has stepped up belatedly to solve the IDN "mess", finally - a step we wholeheartedly applaud. In various discussion "tracks" about deploying country-code IDN equivalents, there has been a suggestion that Cyrillic ".py" should not be designated to Russia. The grounds? It is visually similar to the existing ASCII ccTLD string ".py", assigned to Paraguay and used by this respected nation for over a decade. This argument holds that someone could register a string composed of Cyrillic characters preceding the ASCII ".py". The purpose would be intentional confusion with another registration, but fully Cyrillic, one with the same preceding characters followed of course by a Cyrillic IDN ".py", not ASCII. As we know, this is called "homographic spoofing". The difference between Cyrillic and ASCII, when these two characters are combined as capital letters, is obvious to any native Russian speaker. When the characters are lower-case characters, there is similarity. But beyond that, almost all this undesirable homographic spoofing goes away if ICANN had previously followed the obvious guideline IETF expected, when it formalized IDNA: namely, that any and all IDN domain names must be in a SINGLE script throughout. A wise deployment would have restricted registration to ONLY the characters normally used in a single language script. Unicode may be an all-encompassing character-set, and many European languages do share a large Latin character sub-set. This may have encouraged IDN.ascii composite domains, during the original Versign testbed in 2000 and in the formal deployments, later, after 2003 and continuing today. But if wisdom had prevailed instead, the rules for Paraguay's ".py" would have allowed for registering only ASCII characters relevant to Spanish or Guarani in front (Guarani is Paraguay's indigenous language and uses European Roman characters). And Russia's Cyrillic ".py" would have only Russian Cyrillic characters in front. We in Russia exercised early and continuing prudence with our ".py" where only Cyrillic characters are allowed to precede the Cyrillic TLD. If ICANN had helped us by adopting a similar restraint in its practice, most of the current homographic spoofing would have been eliminated. Homographic spoofing would be seen for the "Red Herring" argument that it is. And the needs of Russia's hundreds of millions would not be sidelined owing to historical errors. Needless to say, we don't want at stake inside Russia the attractiveness and fairness of ICANN as legitimate world arbiter for the Internet. Even if the current final draft on policy for IDN gTLDs continues to allow mixed-script registrations between first and top levels in the domain name - which could legitimate them - a modicum of sense prevailed in finally disallowing mixed script within a level itself. This does illustrate that distinctions among language scripts can and, so, must be made. As no deployments of IDN gTLDs have occurred yet, it is still not too late to reverse this fundamental error for IDN gTLDs. Since the debate on IDN ccTLDs is at an earlier stage, if not for IDN gTLDs, at least for IDN ccTLDs caution should and must be exercised. Only a single script should be allowed all the way through first, top and other levels. In short, we applaud ICANN's renewed, if belated, interest in IDN TLDs. And we are happy that ICANN is considering the needs of Russians. Russians want, and ICANN must designate to Russians, Cyrillic ".py". In fact, Paraguay's NIC (NIC.py) has, on its own, wisely and responsibly obviated the historical error. On their own, they have allowed only registrations in Latin characters. And except for a small percentage of domains, they also have only registered third-level domains behind com.py, net.py, edu.py, org.py, mil.py, and gov.py. Of course the third level is inhospitable to spoofing, if Paraguay did not limit registrations only to Latin characters - which in fact it does limit. On its own Paraguay has conducted its NIC responsibly, so there indeed is no barrier to Paraguay and Russia cooperating happily together - Paraguay with ASCII and Russia with Cyrillic. Those who would put the red herring of homographic spoofing as an obstacle fail to understand the fundamentals. (1) While the two ".py's" may be visually similar when in lower case, spoofing can be eliminated with suitable and simple conditions in the agreement with end-users. In the unlikely event, spoofers' names will be blocked and taken from them, then offered to the good-will owner of the name that is already registered and visually similar. (2) Spoofing can be vastly reduced if ICANN simply elects to allow only a single script all the way through first, top and other levels. This would just follow the good practice of the Paraguay NIC. Spoofing is a crime and should be treated accordingly. It is monstrous, however, to hold a whole nation hostage to petty thievery. That indeed would not be the right policy. We do believe that remote possibilities, defused as above, will not derail ICANN from leading the Internet Community in the right direction. Yours Sincerely, Alexei Sozonov Russian Language Name Internet Consortium, www.rlnic.ru Sergey Sharikov Regtime.net, ICANN Accredited Registrar, www.regtime.net Attachment:
Correct IDN string for Russia.doc |