Dear all,

Please find below the notes and action items from today’s meeting on Thursday, 15 December 2022 at 13:30 UTC.

Kind regards,

Ariel, Steve, and Emily

Notes and Action Items - IDNs EPDP Call – 15 December 2022

Action Items

Action Item 1: EPDP Team members to submit apologies if they do not plan to attend next week’s call.

Action Item 2: Edmon to come back to the EPDP Team with any areas where the Board Working Group has identified divergence between EPDP and ccPDP4 recommendations.

Notes

Welcome and Chair Updates

• Next Thursday is our final call of the year. EPDP Team members are requested to submit apologies if they do not plan to attend next week’s call. If attendance is expected to be very low, the call will be cancelled. Otherwise it will be held as scheduled.

Action Item 1: EPDP Team members to submit apologies if they do not plan to attend next week’s call.

Review of Charter Question E7 (Catch-all)

Singulars and Plural Versions of a Word

• Slide 4 – Jeff’s question -- Did the EPDP Team consider singulars and plurals when deliberating on the String Similarity Review involving variants?
• When the small group was deliberating on the hybrid model, they did not discuss singulars and plurals. Jeff asked this question in the context of the EPDP Team review of the small team’s work.
• Slide 5-6 – SubPro Context – Recommendation 24.3, Implementation Guidance 24.4, and Recommendation 24.5.
• Comment: For Chinese, Japanese, and Korean, this type of pluralization doesn’t work in the same way.
• Question: There are many languages that use the Arabic script. How would these recommendations be handled in this context?
• Comment: Additional questions raised about whether the concept of singular and plural applies to different scripts. For the sake of completeness, we should cover this in the report. If the SubPro recommendation doesn’t create any issues, is it possible to apply to SubPro recommendations without any issue, and if so, this group can affirm them? Do we just apply these recommendations to the primary or also the variants? It may make the most sense to focus on the primary.
• Comment: The SubPro recommendation would seem to apply to all scripts which make morphological changes for singular and plural. English is an example. It adds, for example, an “s” or and “es” in the plural form. In some languages, number is not a morphological phenomenon. It is a more syntactical phenomenon. These recommendations will apply to languages with morphological changes. It will have to be determined in implementation if and how it applies to other languages.
• Comment: This may not be as easy as we think it might be. If you apply for a TLD in Latin, you don’t usually state which language group you are targeting. If a script is used for multiple languages, would you need to check for all plural forms for all languages?
• Clarification: The applicant identifies the language of application, and that language is used for singular/plural assessment.
• Reminder: It is not the task of this group to figure out the implementation of the SubPro recommendations. This will be done by the IRT.
• Summary: Some support expressed for affirming the SubPro approach. To be confirmed by the EPDP Team.

• SubPro suggested that any applied for label would go through this process, this seems to imply that it could also include variants (one interpretation), but this is something to clarify.
• Question: Is a variant potentially a variant of a source label?
• Comment: This can be sorted in implementation of SubPro.
• Slide 7 – Effect of SubPro recommendations - Expand contention set to include singulars and plurals of the same words. The singulars and plurals may or may not visually resemble each other but nonetheless could create a probability of user confusion.  
• Slide 8 - Possible Scenarios Involving Singulars/Plurals & Variants
• Comment: Why limit this to plurals in a contention set. What about other types of modifications, such as male and female?
• Response: Morphologically, words can be modified in different ways. The SubPro WG only shortlisted singular/plural.
• Comment: On the forms of plural, the SubPro recommendations suggest to use a dictionary to determine singulars/plural. These discussions would be finalized and interpreted in implementation. There may be different forms that pluralization occurs and dictionaries will be used as a source.
• Summary: There does not appear to be a problem for this group making a recommendation to support the SubPro recommendations. The leadership team will confirm with the group in a second conversation.

Evaluation Criteria for Requested Variants of Applied-for Strings with Restrictions

• Slide 11 – Context - Do restrictions that apply to a TLD (e.g., community TLDs, dot brand TLDs) also apply to its variants? Are these labels equally treated as different versions of the same string, or completely independent strings not bound by the same restrictions?
• Slide 12 – Preliminary Recommendation & Rationale - Recommendation 2.8: In future new gTLD application processes, the primary applied-for gTLD and its allocatable variant labels requested by the applicant are to be treated as different versions of the same string and will be bound by the same restrictions. 
• In the context of considering these issue, do we need to consider the set. The place where this gets complicated is with .brands.
• Slide 13 – Question: Should the requested variants meet the same application requirements and evaluation criteria as the primary gTLDs?
• Slide 14 -- Examples of Existing gTLDs with “Restrictions”  
• Reminder: geographical names are a limited set within specific categories.
• Comment: There needs to be some identification of the set based on the primary/source label. In thinking about these restrictions, we have to think about it as the primary and its variants.
• Comment: The idea that there is one application should apply here. For .kids, there might be different language communities that might use this term for different things in simplified vs. traditional Chinese. A letter of support should apply to the form that is relevant to their language community. It shouldn’t be necessary for supporting organizations to submit multiple letters to support different variants in the set. Suggestion that where support letters are needed, the letter should reference the entire set.
• Question: For .brands, should there need to be a trademark attached to the variant?
• Comment: this should be optional. The principle is that it is one application, so there should be just one trademark required.
• Comment: If it’s a community, the identified community needs to support the set, although it might speak to a specific element of the set. If it’s a geo name such as a capital city name, the support letter needs to be for the set.

AOB

• Edmon as Board Liaison to the EPDP – If and where EPDP and the ccPDP4 recommendations are expected to diverge, the Board would like to see a section of the recommendations that identifies and explains divergence.
• Leadership comment: If the Board Working Group has identified areas of divergence, can they share this with the EPDP Team?

Action Item 2: Edmon to come back to the EPDP Team with any areas where the Board Working Group has identified divergence between EPDP and ccPDP4 recommendations.

• From the leadership perspective, there are areas that may diverge but that there does not seem to be inconsistency. If the Board disagrees, this should be surfaced so the IDN EPDP and ccPDP4 can discuss and try to resolve before the recommendations of the respective groups are finalized.

• Personal view from Edmon: There is general alignment but some nuanced differences. From the Board point of view, these are the things we need to identify, for example about how to accept or not accept and application to continue, in light of differences in the nature of application windows vs. rolling acceptance.
• Response: EPDP Team can speak to the differences, to the extent they are known, in the Final Report.
• Additional Topic: SubPro ODP – If the Board decides to proceed with Option 2, what are the implications for our work?
• Additional information is needed to understand if and how this work is in the way of the next round. It may not be the case that IDN EPDP gets in the way of the next rounds. Under Option 2, within each 12 month period, there would be an application window, but it may not be possible to apply for variants in the first window. Additional information is needed from org.
• The EPDP will continue to work towards the target dates included in the PCR and deliver ahead of those timeframes, if possible.