Joly MacFie ha scritto:
As we know the The Special Trademarks Issues Working Team (STI) has published its Report which is now available for comment at http://www.icann.org/en/public-comment/public-comment-201001.htm#sti
Many years ago, when the use of non-Latin characters was starting to be introduced "experimentally", I raised the following issue (I think it was at the KL meeting in 2004). In non-English Latin-script Western and Eastern European languages there are lots of accents. When the Internet started to grow, people from Europe started to register "de-accentized" strings for their domains. So, for example, people that wanted to devote a site to universities ("università" in Italian) would register universita.com, with a non-accented "a". Just imagine what would happen if someone else now registered the properly spelled version, "università.com", which would possibly come out higher in search engine queries for "università", be seen as the "correct" version by the users, and in the end undermine the original website and business. People would have a reasonable expectation that, once the proper "accented" version becomes available, people having registered the non-accented version would have priority in getting it. (Actually, the original expectation was that a variants system would be developed for accented Latin characters, so to avoid the problem altogether.) However, no one at ICANN seemed interested in the issue - actually, no one even seemed to understand it. Everyone was just focused on two issues - introduce a bigger market by allowing new domain names, and keeping the governments from non-Latin countries happy. Ciao, -- vb. Vittorio Bertola - vb [a] bertola.eu <-------- --------> now blogging & more at http://bertola.eu/ <--------