Eszett (was Implementation questions)
JFC Morfin
jefsey at jefsey.com
Wed Dec 24 18:50:30 CET 2008
At 14:16 24/12/2008, John C Klensin wrote:
>Certainly, if I were a user registering a label that might be
>construed as being in German, I would try to do that regardless
>of what the relevant registry required. But, if the registry
>did not exclude mixed-script registrations, I might also
>register a label containing β (U+03B2) any time I intended ß
>(U+00DF) to appear and vice versa, simply because, in some
>fonts, they look a little too much alike.
John,
you put yourself in a very confortable situation.
More pragmatically let us imagine that I am another German who has
interests in the same name appearance and I register the other name.
The question now is who is legally (UDRP, ccTLD rules) legitimate? If
a rule favors me, you will legitimately sue the ccTLD Manager since
the actual underlaying ASCII strings are actually different.
You may remember that during the joint ITU/UNESCO meeting in Geneva I
questionned the WIPO on such situations (as well as on babel-names
[protected ASCII labels]). The response (after a few cofees) was that
they respected IPR in ASCII and in Unicode, but were unable to decide
when there was conflict between the two.
What do you think the ccTLD Manager can do, when all such an
additional hassle and costs are to be supported by zero added
revenue? He only can forget about any IETF rule, respecting the rule
of the code. This is exactly what ".su" documented. As long as the
IDNS is only to be supported at user application layer and not at
core presentation layer (i.e. equal to the DNS which actually use the
"default" presentation layer) the problem will stay with us.
Then, what is the solution?
The solution is here now. Let use a multilingual search engine which
will answer when you enter keywords in different languages (with
eszett). So you can use American ASCII to resolve a Chinese _and_
Russian sites in a virtual thematic global network. This works today
on privately licensed machines, this will work on multitier services.
The Multilingual and Semantic Internet does exist today. On a limited
linguistic extension paying basis. The targeted number of languages
was documented in the same Geneva meeting: 150 languages maximum. The
SES (Search Engine System) is a common people oriented simple and
advertizing related alternative to DNS. It will be far easier to
implement commercially driven semantic resolution.
I have no objection to SES IDNA compatibility and common language
support issues to be over discussed in this WG. But at this time the
IETF IDNA2008 LC should have been completed so the various ML-DNS
projects would start being discussed among users.
jfc
More information about the Idna-update
mailing list