Hi all.
Please find below the email that Jothan Frakes has sent, in his personal capacity, to the UASG mailing list and that I am forwarding you with his permission.
I believe that there are some points that should make us think.
As Jothan notes, standards do not impact only contracted parties but have an effect also on registrants and users at-large. I believe that we have not done enough so far in identifying those impacts - and maybe this working group is the place where to develop this discussion.
I am in Bucharest, where I have attended SEEDIG. This has been a great experience for a number of reasons, a very important one being that most languages in this region have non-ASCII scripts - or have at least diacritical characters that imply the use of IDNs. I have learned that the ccTLDs of this region have different policies for treating variants, and this creates a different user experience in different countries.
I was wondering - and I will ask the same question to the UASG - whether we have a report on how variants are managed by different IDN registries. This could be a good starting point to compare the effect upon different registrants and Internet users.
Opinions?
Cheers,
Roberto
Begin forwarded message:
From: Jothan Frakes <jothan(a)gmail.com<mailto:jothan@gmail.com>>
Subject: [UA-discuss] GNSO requested deferral of IDN Guidelines 4.0 Vote - CPH / Registrants impact
Date: 30. April 2019 at 23:27:03 EEST
To: "UA-discuss(a)icann.org<mailto:UA-discuss@icann.org>" <UA-discuss(a)icann.org<mailto:UA-discuss@icann.org>>
The GNSO just sent a letter to request that the vote on adoption of the IDN Guidelines 4.0 be deferred
There is some UA pain that will come from these Guidelines we should be completely aware of.
It is important to identify the manner in which standards can impact the contracted parties, such as the Registries and Registrars, but getting even further out the supply chain into registrants and Internet users, there are some impacts to them as well as their audiences.
If the new standard causes something that was a separate registration to become a variant of another registration, or invalidates an existing registration, this is a bad outcome for the innovators, developers, and early patrons that supported the internationalization of the namespace.
Part of what the objective of UA is, to my reckoning, is to increase engagement and support of coding projects that will require adoption of standards that may not immediately hold levels of RoI to them, and they are looking for reasons not to do them.
These new guidelines are good - and needed - they are the result of many people's hard work, time and wisdom, and address many solutions. The approach of pushing these out is problematic. Further, there seems no recourse for those (even if statistically small) who may be impacted adversely, lose their domain, or have it be invalidated (and thus REVERSE their UA experience)
There is potential impact to existing TLDs, and most notably to registrants of second level names where there are registrations using former standards that become unsupported or invalidated.
A very important challenge we face with the UA effort is inspiring developers to implement IDN and EAI as we help globalize the Internet through our work.
IF the approach on standards will be to invalidate some portion of the community of registrations like this, there must be attention to how this impacts existing innovators.
Innovators worked to drive the standards and increase awareness - and the invalidation or deprecation of a registration that someone has carried for a number of years (some are 15+ years) is the precise opposite of a reward for early support, and it is going to send a very loud message to developers.
I believe that further review is needed by registries on the technical impacts of the changes, but any delay can help ICANN and the community address the disenfranchisement factor.
This should be important to UASG - we need developers to embrace the additional effort that they have to invest in their work to consider IDN, EAI and other things.
-Jothan
Jothan Frakes
+1.206-355-0230 tel
+1.206-201-6881 fax
