Dear colleagues,

I appreciate all these opinions voiced and do think there is good reason for all of them.

If the group is interested in improving this product which we were going to deliver, I am myself ready to provide further input to questions which are more in my area of expertise, such as the question of how systemic bias keeps putting certain languages at a disadvantage and how this may have affected our choice of languages.

How such issues should then be resolved at the level of an LGR is however a question which goes beyond linguistic considerations and needs both careful analysis of how such facts have impacted our work and  careful weighing of potential solutions. However we have had numerous discussions on similar questions before and it has been quite difficult building consensus up to this point to be in a a position to deliver the product as it is, so I’m unsure how renewed considerations by the very same participants could arrive at different conclusions.

So if we truly want to come up with new ideas on how to solve these complex questions in a balanced manner, I would suggest that we look for arbitration or external input from other stakeholders familiar with similar matters around us, such as from fellow GPs, the IP or other interested parties including those mentioned here—not so much as in getting a changed mandate or new guidelines, but more in the sense of finding new perspective and contextualizing questions from a different point of view and in a collegial atmosphere.  

Best,

Meikal
Am 18. Nov. 2021, 18:24 +0100 schrieb Bill Jouris via Latingp <latingp@icann.org>:
Good evening, Michael

It seems to me that, if we have cases where the Similarity Review Panel will virtually always find a conflict, those ought to be variants.  Otherwise we are merely making unnecessary work for someone in the future. 

I also have another concern.  ICANN is discussing requiring registrars and registries to block the registration of domain names which differ only by "variants".  But the IDN project does not (to my admittedly imperfect knowledge) have any plans to recreate the various script panels to consider Second Level Domain Names.  Which means that our list of variants will be all there is.  (And, obviously, there is no feasible way to do a manual review of SLDs ala the TLD Similarity Review Panel.)  Which makes a very narrow definition of variants on our part a recipe for future DNS Abuse.  

I understand the issue with transitivity and widespread variant sets.  (But then, I think transitivity is a seriously flawed concept for something like variants.)  However, we can go a lot further than we have gone without getting to the point of creating variants of ASCII letters. 

Regards,

Bill

On Thursday, November 18, 2021, 12:25:45 AM PST, Michael Bauland via Latingp <latingp@icann.org> wrote:


Good morning Bill,


On 17.11.2021 19:50, Bill Jouris via Latingp wrote:
> Dear Colleagues,
>
> I have drafted a Minority Report.  Per Sarmad's guidance, I have
> submitted it as a Public Comment.  But for those who don't wish to dig
> it our from there, a copy is attached here.


thank you for the minority report. It is always good to make voices
heard that would otherwise be overlooked or forgotten.

Regarding your point about the languages we may have overlooked I have
to admit that I lack knowledge to make a opinionated decision. We might
need to discuss this further and possibly (at least for myself) need to
gather further information.

Regarding variants, while your examples and arguments are correct in
that these letters/labels are very easily confusable for a large portion
of the internet users, I disagree that they should be considered
variants. The rules of which characters may be considered variants are
quite strict and they are not about simple confusion.
The fact that there are confusable labels, as in your example .сом and
.COM, will be the task of the similarity review team. I'm certain that
.сом would not pass the similarity review and would be rejected on
grounds of being confusable with .COM (or rather .com).

I think it's a good decision to keep the variant relationships
restricted to clear-cut cases and not include merely confusables. If all
confusables would be in a variant set, due to transitivity, I'm afraid
we'd have characters being variants (and thus blocking each other) that
are far from being similar. I wouldn't be surprised if that even leads
to a situation in which "a", "o", "q", "p", and "g" are all being
considered variants of each other.

Anyway, that's just my opinion. We should talk about this in the group.

Cheers,

Michael

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