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








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