Bret Fausett ha scritto:
I'd rather hear the plausible story that these these U.S.-based companies (Verisign, Afilias, Neustar) plan on telling the governments of China, Russia, Iran and so on as to why they get to run the IDN versions of COMMERCIAL, INFORMATION and BUSINESS in the official languages of their countries simply by virtue of having an ICANN contract for .COM, .INFO and .BIZ.
I agree with you, yet I think that it is a bit more complicated than this. "Commercial" is a broad concept, prone to local nuances and several semantic equivalents, so it is easy to see why you should have different competing incarnations of it, also in different languages. On the other hand, there is just one Catalonia, so I would expect .cat to point at the same registry whatever is the script in which it is expressed (as long as the translations represent Catalonia, rather than cats or caterpillars). It looks to me that telling between categories of TLDs that have different types of meanings, and thus different features and requirements, might be a natural next step to manage the semantic expectations of the end user. However, categorizing in advance - even if you ensure room for new categories and unexpected ideas - also creates several disadvantages, so I am still not sure about where we should go. I understand that the objections process in the proposal is meant to give the flexibility to deal with this, but we should understand whether that works well in practice (e.g. both to allow national and other geopolitical entities control over their name's representations, and to prevent too broader protection such as Verisign preventing any new .com-like TLD). -- vb. Vittorio Bertola - vb [a] bertola.eu <-------- --------> finally with a new website at http://bertola.eu/ <--------