Bill, In my mind, the real issue is that if both PLUM and PLUMS exist, a typical user not see a real difference and thus my use the wrong one, possibly opening  themselves to fraud or malicious action, but more likely looking for a 2nd level domain in the wrong place and concluding that it has disappeared - More practically trying to find their reservation on hilton.hotel when it is really on hilton.hotels (both fictitious examples).

Although not a real user issue, it would also force multiple registrations to reduce the chance that a user would look in the wrong place.

The reason we are having this discussion in the first place is that there was no prohibition in the 2012 round, and there was a widespread belief that having both singular and plural TLDs was a bad thing. Bad enough that it was the Registry SG that proposed the first version of the ban.

Alan

On Wed, Aug 28, 2024 at 5:40 PM Bill Jouris via CPWG <cpwg@icann.org> wrote:
Hi Carlton, 

I'm all in favor of making the strongest argument possible. But I think it's a mistake to say "Our brief, apparently, is to advocate for the barely attentive end user."  "Barely attentive" assumes that the user would have any reason to suspect that the plural of something that he remembers as singular is something entirely different.  

If I see plum.org, and the actual name is plums.org, will it occur to me that there's a difference?  I beg leave to doubt it.  It's not that I can't see the difference (part of my job is proofreading, after all).  It's just that there is no particular reason to think that the difference is important in this context.  Users generally are simply not paranoid enough to be suspicious of these things.  

Bill Jouris



On Wed, Aug 28, 2024 at 9:32 AM, Carlton Samuels via CPWG
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