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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