Re: [alac] IDN document, draft 4
Some remarks as I go through the document:
- In the second paragraph, the document says that "cultural and
political considerations should be given higher priority than
economical or technical ones". Following this recipe would be
desastrous -- it basically calls for wishful thinking and politics
to ignore technical feasibility and business viability of new
technologies or policies.
Do we really want to run IDNs (and, by extension, the net) on
government funding?
I would say that "cultural and political considerations should be
given due priority", but I would not declare them absolutes.
(For the record, this is an objection against the second
paragraph in its current form.)
- The third paragraph suggests that, out of the fear that mistakes
may be made in the introduction of IDNs, due care must be taken;
in recommendation 8, this care then mutates into a call for
halting the registration of IDNs in gTLDs. At the same time,
recommendation 8 turns the introductory sentence of the third
paragraph into mere lip service -- this leaves a bad taste with
me.
The pattern of this argument is remarkably similar to the one we
have been fighting with respect to the introduction of new gTLDs.
Applying it to earlier innovations on the net, and then looking at
what would have followed from it, makes for an interesting thought
argument.
Hint: I wouldn't write this message (and would probably do
mathematics for a living) if this kind of argument had pervailed
in the past twenty to thirty years.
(For the record, this is an objection against the third
paragraph's essential direction.)
- Recommendation 1 misses the fact that similar or identical scripts
are used differently in different language contexts. Consequently,
confusion opportunities will also be different in different TLDs.
I do not believe that we have done the research (or gathered the
expertise) that would be necessary to make this wide-ranging
recommendation. Please turn this into a recommendation that the
viability of common variant tables be researched.
- The relationship between recommendation 1 and recommendation 2 is
unclear. Don't they contradict each other?
- In recommendation 3, the text says that "not defining any
equivalences is an unacceptable policy, because it would prevent
the adoption of any anti-cybersquatting and anti-confusion
measures." This is simply wrong.
(Think "confusing similarity" -- it seems naïve to me to even
assume that decisions on fuzzy criteria such as confusion or
similarity could be made on the basis of hard and fast rules;
ultimately, this will always be a judgment call.)
Please strike this part of the argument.
- Recommendation 4 is ok when "equivalence" is dealt with properly.
- Recommendation 6 does, on the substance (sunrise/block for
equivalence classes which contain a latin-only name that has
already been registered) sound well. The example, however, makes
the assumption that the crude romanizations in use now would
automatically be included with equivalences. It is not at all
clear that this assumption is warranted. Hence, the example needs
to go.
- I continue to object against recommendation 8, and request that my
objection be included with any published non-draft version of the
document that includes recommendation 8.
- In recommendation 9, the word "promptly" seems misplaced, in
particular in a context in which ALAC (wrongly) calls for the
suspension of IDN registrations. "Can be reached in a timely
manner" would be more appropriate.
Regards,
--
Thomas Roessler · Personal soap box at <http://log.does-not-exist.org/>.