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 -- ____________________________________________________________________ | | | 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 _______________________________________________ Latingp mailing list Latingp@icann.org https://mm.icann.org/mailman/listinfo/latingp _______________________________________________ By submitting your personal data, you consent to the processing of your personal data for purposes of subscribing to this mailing list accordance with the ICANN Privacy Policy (https://www.icann.org/privacy/policy) and the website Terms of Service (https://www.icann.org/privacy/tos). You can visit the Mailman link above to change your membership status or configuration, including unsubscribing, setting digest-style delivery or disabling delivery altogether (e.g., for a vacation), and so on.