Dear all,

Please find below the notes from today’s meeting on Thursday, 7 October 2021 at 13:00 UTC.

Best regards,

Ariel, Steve, and Emily

Action Items:

Action Item #1: Leadership team to follow up on the mailing list to get input on who will be able to attend the ICANN72 working session for this group. Leadership team to also seek input on the schedule of regular WG meetings around ICANN72.

Notes – IDNs EPDP Call – 7 October 2021

Welcome and Chair Updates

• Donna is officially taking over as Chair starting today. Edmon is joining the ICANN Board beginning at the AGM.
• This group will have a working session during on Tuesday 26 October at 16:30-17:30. Leadership wants to confirm whether there will be critical mass which will inform how we will spend the time during the meeting and will follow up on list about this item.
• Today’s presentation is primarily technical but might touch on some policy issues. Please flag it if it touches on policy, but it is not necessary to worry too much.
• Suggestion from WG member: Have the regular meeting next week on the 14^th but then take a break from the regular meetings for the following two weeks. This will be taken to the list.
• The working group will also need to revisit its regular schedule after ICANN72.

Presentation on RZ-LGR

• History of RZ-LGR – slides 4 & 5 – Initial work of the Variant Issues Project conducted in 2010-2011; Integrated issues report published in 2012; LGR procedure approved by the ICANN Board in 2013
• RZ-LGR Design and Development Process
  • Design Principles – slide 7 & 8 – Drive the development of the LGR for different scripts: Longevity, Least Astonishment, Contextual Safety, Inclusion, Simplicity, Predictability, Stability, Letter, Conservatism
    • These principles are focused on specific characters and whether they are considered valid (as opposed to looking at whole strings).
  • RZ-LGR Proposal Development Process – slide 9 – Script communities form script-based Generation Panels of volunteers, which design a solution and work with the Integration Panel in an iterative process to develop the proposal.
    • Integration Panel did some of the initial work to identify scripts that needed Generation Panels and did outreach to the communities to develop the GPs. Some outreach was required to get people up to speed about the work and bring people together to form the GPs. The level of effort varied from script to script.
  • Integration Panel Composition – slide 10 & 11 – Integration Panel is comprised of a small number of impartial experts with specific areas of expertise.
  • Generation Panel Composition and Work Organization – slide 11 &12 – Open and as diverse as possible, work is conducted via regular calls, wiki pages, mailing lists, and sometimes face-to-face meetings.
    • Comment: What is confusing to an end user is not necessarily confusing for an expert. We should be careful about what goes into the RZ-LGR.
    • Response: Confusability is typically handled through the string similarity process and not the RZ-LGR process.
    • Question: How difficult will it be to make an update to the RZ-LGR?
    • Response: The review will typically be very limited in scope, so it will be a more contained problem compared to the initial problem the Panels were tasked with solving.
  • Capturing Linguistic Diversity – slide 13 & 14 – Some scripts are used by many languages. How much support should be considered by the Generation Panels? The EGIDS values are used to help determine which languages to include in the analysis to ensure linguistic diversity is captured.
  • Process to Develop RZ-LGR – slide 15 – Script community forms a GP; GP develops proposal for RZ-LGR in XML; GP consults with IP; Public Comment; GP finalizes proposal; IP reviews, accepts, and integrates it into the RZ-LGR if it meets design principles; Public Comment; IP finalizes and publishes next version of RZ-LGR
• Summary of Work on RZ-LGR
  • Summary of Generation Panel Work  – slide 17 – time taken to finalize work for different scripts
  • Timeline for RZ-LGR Development – slide 18
  • Status of Scripts and use of RZ-LGR – slide 19 & 20 – Publication of Recommendations for Managing the IDN Variant TLDs, Board resolution for the GNSO and ccNSO to take these recommendations into account, Board resolution for GNSO and ccNSO to take into account Recommendations for the Technical Utilization of the RZ-LGR in their PDPs, SubPro recommendations
• How Does RZ-LGR Work? – slide 22-25 – For existing TLD, tool can tell whether there are variants as well as which variants are allocatable and which are blocked; For a new label, the first question is whether it is a valid label, if valid then the question is whether there are variants and if there are variants, which are allocatable and which are blocked. Script community develops the framework to determine which should be blocked.
  • This PDP will determine, if it’s allocatable, who can apply for it and what are the rules and process steps for doing so. WG will also look at the treatment of second level domains under those labels.