Hi Alan, I could certainly support a ban. The challenge, as I see it, is that it may well not be obvious to whomever in ICANN is looking at proposed registrations, that something is a plural. English plurals are pretty simple, usually just involving adding S at the end. But French (to take just one example) uses rather more complex changes to signal plurals. And there re so many languages that it rapidly becomes impossible to recognize them all. Accordingly, it seems to me that, whatever policy is finally adopted needs to provide some mechanism for identifying plurals. (Or, for that matter, singulars of something previously registered in the plural form.) My thought is that, as an imperfect approach, new TLD applicants could be required to identify, on their application, the singular/plural of their proposed TLD, regardless of whether they intend to register both (if we decide to allow that). Note that this would also entail reaching out to current TLD holders, to ask them to likewise identify plurals of their TLD. Bill On Thursday, August 29, 2024 at 11:18:39 AM PDT, Alan Greenberg <greenberg.alan@gmail.com> wrote: 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 Sent from Yahoo Mail on Android On Wed, Aug 28, 2024 at 9:32 AM, Carlton Samuels via CPWG<cpwg@icann.org> wrote: _______________________________________________ CPWG mailing list -- cpwg@icann.org To unsubscribe send an email to cpwg-leave@icann.org _______________________________________________ By submitting your personal data, you consent to the processing of your personal data for purposes of subscribing to this mailing list accordance with the ICANN Privacy Policy (https://www.icann.org/privacy/policy) and the website Terms of Service (https://www.icann.org/privacy/tos). You can visit the Mailman link above to change your membership status or configuration, including unsubscribing, setting digest-style delivery or disabling delivery altogether (e.g., for a vacation), and so on. _______________________________________________ CPWG mailing list -- cpwg@icann.org To unsubscribe send an email to cpwg-leave@icann.org _______________________________________________ By submitting your personal data, you consent to the processing of your personal data for purposes of subscribing to this mailing list accordance with the ICANN Privacy Policy (https://www.icann.org/privacy/policy) and the website Terms of Service (https://www.icann.org/privacy/tos). You can visit the Mailman link above to change your membership status or configuration, including unsubscribing, setting digest-style delivery or disabling delivery altogether (e.g., for a vacation), and so on. | | Virus-free.www.avg.com |