In regards this statement “Registries and Registrars are encouraged to only use US-ASCII encoding and character repertoire for WHOIS port 43 output.”. The paragraph from ICANN advisory notes on Sep 12 states: As described in RFC 3912, the WHOIS protocol (port-43) has not been internationalized. While a substitute protocol is being developed in the IETF, Registries and Registrars are encouraged to only use US-ASCII encoding and character repertoire for WHOIS (port-43) output. If the RegistryOperator/Registrar uses characters outside of the US-ASCII repertoire, the output MUST be encoded in UTF-8 to maximize the chances of interoperability. Although iCANN encourages use of US-ASCII it does not exclude the use of other characters sets as long as they are encoded in UTF-8. From: owner-gnso-contactinfo-pdp-wg@icann.org [mailto:owner-gnso-contactinfo-pdp-wg@icann.org] On Behalf Of Petter Rindforth Sent: Wednesday, November 12, 2014 6:41 PM To: Emily Taylor Cc: gnso-contactinfo-pdp-wg@icann.org Subject: Re: [gnso-contactinfo-pdp-wg] Re: Translation and Transliteration of Contact Information PDP Working Group Thursday 30 October 2014 / some further comments/questions, etc Thanks, Emily. I'll have a meeting within 20 min from now to further discuss this topic (at INTA). Best, Petter -- Petter Rindforth, LL M Fenix Legal KB Stureplan 4c, 4tr 114 35 Stockholm Sweden Fax: +46(0)8-4631010 Direct phone: +46(0)702-369360 E-mail: petter.rindforth@fenixlegal.eu<mailto:petter.rindforth@fenixlegal.eu> www.fenixlegal.eu<http://www.fenixlegal.eu> NOTICE This e-mail message is intended solely for the individual or individuals to whom it is addressed. It may contain confidential attorney-client privileged information and attorney work product. If the reader of this message is not the intended recipient, you are requested not to read, copy or distribute it or any of the information it contains. Please delete it immediately and notify us by return e-mail. Fenix Legal KB, Sweden, www.fenixlegal.eu<http://www.fenixlegal.eu> Thank you 11 november 2014, Emily Taylor <emily.taylor@netistrar.com<mailto:emily.taylor@netistrar.com>> skrev: Dear Petter Thank you for your message, and apologies for the delay in responding to your points. I wanted to address the claim that because contracted parties had not made noises about ICANN’s advisory they must be okay with it. I’ve attached a letter that I'm informed was provided by the RySG to ICANN staff as a result of the RySG being provided an early version of the advisor for comment. I understand that none of these comments were taken into account by ICANN when they published the advisory and despite being asked why, I don’t believe any answer was forthcoming. In short, there have been expressions of concern over the recent advisory, and my understanding from discussions on the RrSG list is that many have concerns over transliteration and translation of WHOIS data. Kind regards Emily On 30 October 2014 13:20, Petter Rindforth <petter.rindforth@fenixlegal.eu<mailto:petter.rindforth@fenixlegal.eu>> wrote: Dear All, Just a last minute summary of Some further comments/questions/inputs/suggestions: (collected from the IP point of view) Note that ICANN issued an advisory last month clarifying technical aspects of provisions of the 2013 RAA and new gTLD Registry Agreement regarding uniform requirements for presenting Whois data. https://www.icann.org/resources/pages/registry-agreement-spec4-raa-rdds-2014... . Significantly , it states that “Registries and Registrars are encouraged to only use US-ASCII encoding and character repertoire for WHOIS port 43 output.” The purpose is to facilitate parsing of Whois data by automated tools such as ICANN’s centralized Whois data portal, http://whois.icann.org/ . Similar arguments would apply to facilitating machine translation. Thus the status quo is (or will be, by February 2015) that contracted parties are at least “encouraged” to transliterate into ASCII if Whois data is submitted in some other script. Has anyone heard any howls of outrage from registries and registrars over this? The advisory also states” All domain name labels in the values of any of the fields described in section 1.4.2 of the 2013 RAA, and sections 1.5, 1.6, and 1.7 of Specification 4 of the Registry Agreement (e.g., Domain Name, Name Server, email) MUST be shown in ASCII-compatible form (A-Label). For example, a name server with an IDN label should be shown as: Name Server: ns1.xn--caf-dma.example.” The referenced fields include virtually all the registrant data we are concerned with. See the listing in section 1.4.2 of Specification 3 of the 2013 RAA, https://www.icann.org/resources/pages/approved-with-specs-2013-09-17-en . I’m not certain whether this ASCII requirement applies only to the labels (e.g., “Name Server”) or to the content following the label --- the example given suggests the latter—which further solidifies the idea that contracted parties are already required to transliterate Whois data into ASCII. But I could be misreading this requirement. §§§ · "I think it would be useful to suggest the requirement that all Whois text be machine-readable text. I’m not sure if that’s already a recommendation of the EWG report, but as one can imagine, the Whois systems that substitute graphics for the e-mail (which, for all we know, could spread to other fields) would stymie attempts at automated translation by users of Whois. · Does anyone have any ideas for avoiding flight by bad actors to the least translatable languages? One idea would be to require: · Whois info to be in either the language of the registrar or registrant (i.e. can’t pick some random language just to make it hard to translate), and · translation or transliteration is required if it’s not in a) Latin characters, b) one of the six U.N. languages, or c) possibly some larger but reasonable set of well-known and widely translatable languages (say, 20 or so)." -- Petter Rindforth, LL M Fenix Legal KB Stureplan 4c, 4tr 114 35 Stockholm Sweden Fax: +46(0)8-4631010<tel:%2B46%280%298-4631010> Direct phone: +46(0)702-369360 E-mail: petter.rindforth@fenixlegal.eu<mailto:petter.rindforth@fenixlegal.eu> www.fenixlegal.eu<http://www.fenixlegal.eu> NOTICE This e-mail message is intended solely for the individual or individuals to whom it is addressed. It may contain confidential attorney-client privileged information and attorney work product. If the reader of this message is not the intended recipient, you are requested not to read, copy or distribute it or any of the information it contains. Please delete it immediately and notify us by return e-mail. Fenix Legal KB, Sweden, www.fenixlegal.eu<http://www.fenixlegal.eu> Thank you -- Emily Taylor MA(Cantab), MBA Director Netistrar Ltd - Domain Names at Trade Prices W: http://www.netistrar.com<http://www.netistrar.com/> | M: 07540 049322 | T: 01283 617808 Repton House, Bretby Business Park, Bretby, Derbyshire, DE15 0YZ Registered in England and Wales No. 08735583. VAT No. 190062332