Another Transition Plan Proposal

Cary Karp ck at nic.museum
Fri Dec 11 09:37:48 CET 2009


> So I guess what confuses me about this is that, in the context of 
> IDN spoofing, there was a lot of talk of "bundling or blocking" variant 
> forms. What did people mean when they said "bundling"? DNAME? Are we now 
> back to the point that no-one really knows what "bundling" means?

In general discourse among TLD operators, the term "bundling" means the 
association of one label with another during the registration process.
The term has several more specific senses depending on whether it is 
enforced algorithmically, or is based on registration-time dialog, or is 
left entirely to the registrant.

The term "blocking" commonly designates one possible outcome -- making a 
label unavailable for registration. Here again there are several 
flavors, of which the most common are categorical restriction from 
registration by anyone, and the reservation of the label for 
registration by the holder of another label in the bundle.

I suggest you take a close look at the background documentation for the 
IDN policies of ccTLDs that have substantial need to deal with cases 
such as the name-related labels "møller" and "möller". I doubt that you 
will find any that regard these as equivalent. A policy that confers no 
rights to an ø-label to the holder of an otherwise identical ö-label, 
will obviously have been made in recognition of the fact that the 
corresponding o-label (something that most registries would recommend, 
given the fledgling state of the IDN art) can, at most, only go to the 
one of them.

Given the experience that alphabetically oriented registries have with 
such situations, I simply cannot understand the exceptional properties 
that are being ascribed to the introduction of ß and ς. Yes, there is an 
additional point of potential confusion compared with the introduction 
of, say, the decorated o's. No, the ability of a registry to deal with 
this does not require protocol constraint on its freedom to do so in 
accordance with its own assessment of the best interest of its constituency.

/Cary


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