Hei Tapani, thanks for your input. I am not sure, however, whether this is something that falls into our PDP remit. I fully agree that sääri and saari are different words. But so are many other examples including ASCII-only like "just" and "jest". In the context of TLD (application), I see the following possible outcomes (without our PDP), if both saari and sääri are applied for. 1. saari and sääri are not considered similar by the review panel. => both TLDs can co-exist. 2. saari and sääri are considered similar by the review panel. => The TLDs go into a contention set. Only one can be approved. The other will be rejected. Now, if our PDP were to decide that ä vs. a would be an exception case. Then we have the following situation. 1. => no change, still both TLDs can co-exist. 2. There are now two sub-cases: a) The applicant for saari is different from the applicant for sääri. => Same as previous situation, Contention Set and only one can win. b) The applicant for saari is the same as for sääri. => Depending on our exact recommendations, most likely saari and sääri can co-exist with some special requirements. Language considerations are therefore irrelevant to our work. Language considerations may or may not be relevant to the String Similarity Review Panel, but that's out of scope. We don't know if they consider languages when deciding whether two labels are too similar or whether they do not. As a Finn you might want to reject a decision that saari and sääri are too similar (if that were to be decided by the String Similarity Panel), but this is out of scope for our PDP. We have to take the String Similarity Panel as a given fact. It exists. It will decide one way or another. We do not discuss their decisions/outcomes. We only deal with situations in which they decide: these strings should be rejected, because they are confusingly similar. Cheers, Michael -- ____________________________________________________________________ | | | knipp | Knipp Medien und Kommunikation GmbH ------- Technologiepark Martin-Schmeisser-Weg 9 44227 Dortmund Germany Dipl.-Informatiker Fon: +49 231 9703-0 Fax: +49 231 9703-200 Dr. Michael Bauland SIP: Michael.Bauland@knipp.de Software Development E-mail: Michael.Bauland@knipp.de Register Court: Amtsgericht Dortmund, HRB 13728 Chief Executive Officers: Dietmar Knipp, Elmar Knipp Certified according DIN ISO/IEC 27001:2017