an interesting ICANN development on similar domain names

Eric Brunner-Williams ebw at abenaki.wabanaki.net
Sun Aug 10 02:44:38 CEST 2008


Vint,

When I was at the GNSO Council + ICANN Staff meeting in LA earlier this 
year, to go over the Staff's proposals for the new gTLD evaluation and 
schedule, this was discussed.

Which is to say quite a few people wondered out loud just what this was 
for, and how it would help. As an observer I limited myself to "will my 
proposals be charged for a share of the cost of this absurd thing. The 
algorithm then demonstrated gave high "alike" values for things like 
"us" and "eus", the iso3166 code point for the United States, and the 
iso639 code point for the Basque language, which didn't inspire much 
positive awe on my part.

No one seemed to be really impressed with this on its face, and it isn't 
unreasonable to think about how such an "objective" or "widely used" 
thingamabob from some other problem domain is either misapplied in the 
ASCII and ASCII-encoded-mumble evaluation process, or applied with a 
purpose that is unlike its original purpose in its original problem domain.

It was also discussed when Kurt the the stand-up again (in less than two 
days) at ICANN Paris. I don't know who'd be sad if it wandered off 
looking for a better home.

Eric

Vint Cerf wrote:
>
> *tring Similarity Algorithm Update* -- ICANN staff recently completed 
> a workshop with SWORD, the partner who is assisting ICANN with the 
> creation of an algorithm that will help automate the process for 
> assessing similarity among proposed and existing TLD strings. SWORD's 
> verbal search algorithms are used by various patent and trademark 
> offices throughout the world. SWORD has completed a beta algorithm and 
> reviewed several test cases with ICANN staff. This is being done in 
> order to refine the parameters and discuss how the algorithm could be 
> successfully integrated as a tool to help implement the GNSO's 
> recommendation that new gTLD strings should not result in user 
> confusion with existing TLDs.
>
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