[alac] Re: [alac-admin] IDN

[Vittorio Bertola <vb@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

On Tue, 30 Nov 2004 10:07:17 -0500, Thomas Roessler
<roessler@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

>> The problem is that here we have a very peculiar situation, in
>> which the existing domain (e.g. liberte.com) is actually the typo
>> for the new one (liberté) - so the person who would now get the
>> IDN version would basically turn the existing registrant into a
>> squatter.
>
>How does this keep a process like the UDRP from solving the problem?

UDRP is for bad faith cases. You wouldn't necessarily be having bad faith
here - simply, someone else would register the name that you thought you
owned until now, since you registered its "deformed" romanized version with
the only characters that were allowed at that time. And all of a sudden, all
of your 7-year marketing investment on "liberte.com" would be mostly gone,
before you had time to notice.

Or to be more practical: if we don't follow this path, I swear you that I
will try to register at&t.* (with the ampersand), publish a simple but quite
legitimate web page that deals with Astrology, Telepathy & Transcendence,
and enjoy the show :-) Do you think that this would prove the fairness of
the "laissez-faire" approach?

>When facing the choice between encumbering the process of
>registering every single domain name with a complicated and
>unflexible ruleset, and handling the relatively few actual problems
>by a dispute resolution process, then I'd go for the dispute
>resolution approach.

But how do we know in advance that the ruleset would have to be complicated
and unflexible, or that the problems should be few? Perhaps we should just
ask the "steering committee" to consider the feasibility.

For example, a simpler approach could be a "human-managed" sunrise period,
when you mail all present registrants and say: look, we are going to start
selling IDNs three months from now, but if you tell us that there is an
IDN-equivalent version of your domain name which you would like to have,
we'll be giving it to you in advance.

>Once more, URI schemes are a something that you don't
>internationalize "in the infrastructure." The very purpose of URI
>schemes, as far as infrastructure is concerned, is to be universally
>unique and accepted.

You could, for example, "resolve" the scheme string to a universal protocol
name, exactly like you resolve the host string to a universal IP address.
It's just a matter of adding one more layer over the top, exactly like they
did 20 years ago with the DNS.

But I agree that I'm not particularly expert in the matter, so I'd be glad
to involve the W3C people. (Could you perhaps introduce the person to me by
e-mail? Would the rest of the Committee be ok in using him as advisor?)

>> and that ICANN should take the lead on that, 
>
>I don't think it should.

But, in fact, it already has, since it is starting to allow registries to
sell IDNs - which, in fact, means leading this process. It can only choose
whether to do a good job or a bad job.
-- 
vb.               [Vittorio Bertola - v.bertola [a] bertola.eu.org]<------
http://bertola.eu.org/  <- Vecchio sito, nuovo toblòg...