Thanks for your analysis, Mark.
I may have missed this, but has there been any
discussion around grandfathering or bundles of SLDs under
both TLDs that would help avoid confusion of an identical
second level domain under both TLDs?
Thomas
I have been studying the Latin Script Root Zone Label
Generation Rules [here] and, for practical
purposes, (U+0065) vs. é (U+00E9) are not variants. The
variants for lower case Latin letter "e" are listed under
"Variant Set 3" and consist of one homoglyph (forward and
reverse mapping) and one out-of-repertoire (reflexive)
instance, both which do not apply here. Also, é (U+00E9) is
recognized as part of the French language in the document, so
linguistic relevance is recognized there.
Potential for malice also does not come up as a significant
concern in the LGR, as opposed to something like dotted i
(U+0069) vs. dotless i (U+0131), for example.
That said, considering that we are dealing with a geoTLD,
linguistic and cultural relevance are important aspects, and
looking into the writing of the word "Québec" on the Web, both
the the "e" and "é" cases seem to be widely employed, in such
a way that they are interchangeable in a way. If these TLDs
were to be managed independently, that would almost certainly
lead to confusion.
However, the requestor of the accented TLD is the same as
that of the ASCII TLD, which is PointQuébec, so we are looking
into a "same entity" situation. If PointQuébec were to run
both TLDs as if they were the same (as if they were variants),
meaning that domain names would resolve consistently instead
of being operated independently, this would allow the people
of Québec the linguistic freedom to utilize their language
while at the same time avoiding confusion.
Since, as Seb pointed out, this is the only applicant from
the first round reaching out to have this issue resolved, it
does not seem to be out of scope to simply recognize their
request, and allow them to operate the TLDs in this way, more
than anything because there seems to be no good reason not to.
We would just need to be very clear about the necessity of
both TLDs operating in this consistent manner.
Best,