On 26.07.11 02:30, Andrew Sullivan wrote:

"Meaning or restatement of string in English. The applicant will provide a

short description of what the string would mean or represent in English."

Thank you for bringing this requirement to my attention; I somehow

missed it in previous readings of the guidebook.  I'm sure you can

work out what my (personal) opinion of this requirement is.

I always wished our work to be useful at all levels of DNS, but TLDs are definitely supposed to have meaning. So therefore, if we are to focus on variants in the context of TLDs (primarily), then we must consider the meaning "variants".

Even if we do not consider the "meaning" as a string variant, it will surely be considered as such at some other policy level.

If we talk about meaning of the string at any level in DNS, then I could justify your opinion -- however the policies at different levels are quiet different. On many levels "anything goes".

I think it is safe to claim that TLDs do have meaning _associated to them_

Semioticians will tell us that _everything_ has meaning associated to

it.  Of course DNS labels have more or less meaning for a given

person, and over time a user community might come to converge on a

conventional meaning.  On the other hand, I've often heard it said

that .org domains are for non-profits.

This I believe was coined during the Bucharest ICANN meeting, where the .ORG TLD was subject to bids. RFC1591 says about .ORG:

ORG - This domain is intended as the miscellaneous TLD for
organizations that didn't fit anywhere else. Some non-
government organizations may fit here.

On the other hand, would ICANN agree for a gTLD .ОРГ (same phonetics, same abbreviated meaning in Bulgarian, at least) to exist separately from .ORG? If not, why?
It is different, because:
- has different script (Cyrillic)
- does not have visual similarity (oh yes, 'Г' is equivalent with 'R' :)
- does have different Abstract Characters and produces different punnycode.

There are many cases like this, that support the non-character base to define variants in DNS.
Of course, none of these are technical.
But then, character variants are not technical as well. :)

Daniel