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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