Dear All,

It is always useful, when working in a group, to periodically ask yourself "why are we here", "what problem we are trying to solve", "what is supposed to be the outcome of our work".

Why has this group been convened?

I believe we are here because there's a vague perception in the community that there are situations when two or more TLD strings should be treated "the same". However, there is no clear understanding as to what exactly "the same " means, i. e. what the behaviour of these variant TLDs should be. And here we are to remove the vagueness and better formulate the issue before further discussion may occur in the technical and policy development groups. Am I right capturing the mission?

Note that nothing in the above suggests what these variant TLD strings should be and how they relate to each other.

I do appreciate the work that has been done on the definitions document. However, I can't help noticing that this document is centred around the concept that variant labels are the ones that are generated by means of character-by-character substitution via Language Variant Tables (I'll refer to them as character-based variants).

It has been already suggested by several members that variant strings can also be based on other types of similarity/equivalence, such as:

These situations are not covered in the current definitions document and continuing to ignore this issue may produce a wrong impression that there is a group consensus that variant labels can only be character-based. I do not think presense of such a consensus is the case (can easily be tested via a poll). Don't you think having a consensus on such an important underlying issue is important for the group?

Thanks,
Vladimir Shadrunov