Comments of Chinese VIP team report

[John C Klensin <klensin+icann@xxxxxxx>]

                           ICANN VIP Project: Chinese Script
                                                John C Klensin

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Note: This review was prepared at the request of the ICANN
Variant Information Project Team and partially supported by
ICANN.  It reflects the author's personal views and may not
reflect the views of ICANN staff, the members of the VIP teams,
or other personnel associated with ICANN.  The author had the
opportunity to do partial reviews of working drafts of this
document and prepared comments for the team.  Some of those
comments are reflected in the report as posted and hence do not
appear here.  Sections of it draw heavily on other work by the
author that bears on the issues discussed.

---------------------------- 

This is an well-written and thorough report that shows the
influence of several years of operating TLDs that use the
system of variants the document explains (including allocating
and delegating second-level domains).  The document also
provides a valuable tutorial on the use of characters from this
script.  That description has now been improved sufficiently
that  it should avoid many of the criticisms about
accidentlaly-misleading comments.

The report on Chinese script has the distinctions among these
reports that (i) there was representation on the team of each
of the languages that uses the script and (ii) the issues and
approaches identified are a further iteration and refinement,
based partially on significant implementation and deployment
experience, of analyses completed over five years ago. 

Although it is clear from reading the report, the community
should take note of the fact that there is no intent to take
direct advantage of any notions of an SC string and a TC string
being "the same" or "equivalent".  Instead, the intent is to
enable SC content, handling, and subdomains if the TLD is SC
and TC content, handling, and subdomains if the TLD is in SC
form.  The related TC TLD might well support the same general
structures as its TC counterparst, but they are not bound
together by technical means.  Instead, the relationships can be
preserved only by strong commitments and professionalism on the
part of registrants.  Since it is almost certain that some
registrants will be less committed or professional than others,
the approach also calls for an alert registry with the ability
to enforce policies fairly, consistently, and without concerns
about interference by external forces (especially external
forces that may not behave consistently).