Re: Mississippi Hißes

[John C Klensin]

--On Sunday, December 13, 2009 21:14 +0100 Patrik Fältström
<patrik at frobbit.se> wrote:

> I think it helps to have some kind of bundling at the time of
> registration. If then later the registrants "do funky stuff"
> (a multitude of things comes to mind), then the registry can
> not prohibit that.

Patrik,

As I indicated in my earlier note (which crossed yours on the
net), registration-time checks for label variants and taking of
registration-time action on that basis is going to be lots more
reasonable and practical for many registries than long-term
bundling.

But, if we get to what the registry can and cannot prohibit,
most kinds of "funky stuff" can certainly be prohibited if that
is actually desired (and important enough).  It is a _lot_ of
work because, to do so effectively, the registry databases must
have mechanisms for treating the "variant bundle" as a group,
for treating every registration or transfer in terms of the
variant bundles it might interact with and those variant bundles
it might create.  That grouping must include, e.g., database
mechanisms that prevent transferring registration of one name in
the bundle without transferring all of the others.  And those
mechanisms, in turn, need escape mechanisms for, e.g., judicial
orders that might break up the bundle.  One also needs policy
and dispute resolution mechanisms for degrees of relationship
among domain name holders, variant bundles that might overlap,
policies about whether the "owner" of a bundle is permitted to
delegate them separately to different servers and whether the
zone files for the delegated domains are required to be
associated or similar in any particular ways, and so on.

It is a very big deal to convert or configure a registry to work
that way.  Personally, I have trouble believing that a registry
would want to do it for only one or two sets of characters,
especially so when just a few characters are involved and there
might be reasons for treating them as separate (by contrast with
Sharp-S and "ss", I can imagine no circumstances in a Chinese
context under which one would want to treat a Simplified Chinese
character and the corresponding Traditional one as different).
But we do have worked examples of its having been done, and done
at fairly large scale, so this is really another example of why
the registries should (and will, IMO) make their own decisions
and of why the IETF would be overreaching by trying to create a
"one size fits all" policy that tells registries what to do
independent of local considerations and decisions.

    john