Update of RFC 2606 based on the recent ICANN changes?

James Seng james at seng.sg
Thu Jul 3 02:29:40 CEST 2008


On Thu, Jul 3, 2008 at 7:01 AM, John C Klensin <john-ietf at jck.com> wrote:
>> Any proposal for a new gTLD must satisfy a number of "string
>> criteria" that will be specified explicitly in the RFP,
>> including the requirements that the U-label must not:
>>
>> (a) be identical to an existing TLD;
>
> Is "сом" identical to "com"? (the first of these is U+0441
> U+043E U+043C)

The current principle is that it should be be a "confusing string",
which is vague enough to cover the case above (but perhaps not able to
cover .co)

>> (b) be identical to a Reserved Name;
>
>> (c) consist of a single character;
>
> I've heard it argued repeatedly that this is an unreasonable
> rule for ideographic characters.   I don't have an opinion, but
> hope that ICANN has considered that case in full details.

This is where we dive into a discussion what is a "character". In
ideographic based language, there isnt a concept of a "word".

For example, Chinese, Japanese and Korean are actually "phonetics
language", and that ideograph characters are used to express the
phonetics. A "word" or more accurately "morphemes" can be express in a
single or more ideographs. A single latin character is unlikely to be
useful by itself (except of a and i) but thats not the case in CJK.

If the condition is that "no single ASCII character", I may be neutral
about it (since a single ideograph would never translate to a single
ASCII character in the zonefile, due to the xn-- prefix) but if the
"character" is defined more broadly to cover "U-label" character, then
I would have strong objections.

Incidentally, I remember it is a standing "tradition" that labels may
not be a single ascii character. But is there any technical reason we
should forbid it? (e.g. 6.cn have not kill any kittens yet)

-James Seng


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