Bundling vs Mapping

Martin Duerst duerst at it.aoyama.ac.jp
Thu Feb 26 04:51:09 CET 2009


At 00:29 09/02/26, Eric Brunner-Williams wrote:

>The first is to generalize on a misconception that Martin made several 
>days ago:
>
>    That's of course possible. But that basically means asking to pay again
>    for something that the registrant thought they already had as part of
>    their registration.

I don't think that was a misconception on my side. I put in the
qualifier 'basically', with the intended meaning of "for the most part"
(1b at http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/basically).
Maybe "may mean" instead of "basically means" would have been
clearer, sorry. Anyway, thanks for the additional information,
and for correcting potential misconceptions for third parties.

It is of course possible to organize a sunrise opportunity (or bundling,
but what wasn't what the above text referred to) in a way that doesn't 
increase costs for the user of the original domain name. But that's not
what's usually done, as far as I'm aware of.

Also, going back to my mail at
http://www.alvestrand.no/pipermail/idna-update/2009-February/003523.html
I might want to add that for somebody who assumed that they had
registered Fussball including the 'sz', even a sunrise opportunity
without additional costs would come at a great surprise.

[For a slightly different example, assume you have a domain name
"foo.com", and you suddenly get a mail saying: "Starting from
2010, the domain name system has been revamped to allow independent
registration of upper- and lower-case domain names. As a curtesy
to currently registered users, we offer a sunrise opportunity.
If you go to our website before the end of this month, you are
able to obtain the additional domain names FOO.com, FOO.com,...
perpetually for free (as long as you keep paying for foo.com)."
I think everybody getting such an email would be highly annoyed,
rather than pleased at the "free offer".]


>Martin doesn't know how the CDNC registries proposed to make the 
>protection of user expectations transparent to (and costless to) the end 
>user, he wasn't there when we struggled with the issue, pre-IDNA2003 
>WGLC. And I don't expect him to ever stop trying to correct me about the 
>SC/TC problem.

The issue of whether a technical or administrative solution
(such as bundling or sunrise) is made costless or not, and
the issue of whether a certain technical solution (such as
a fixed, language-independent mapping) is linguistically
adequate are really separate.

What I keep correcting you about is that it is impossible to solve
the SC/TC problem with a simple, language-independent mapping.
At some point in the work leading up to IDNA2003, many people thought
it might be possible, but upon closer look, it turned out that
it wasn't. People like Ken Whistler and me had said so all
along, and most other people interested in the subject, such
as James Seng, came to the conclusion rather quickly once they
started to actually try to put together the actual data and found
the complicated cases.

That still doesn't prevent any of the CDNC registries to do bundling
(costless or not). I don't know what they actually do currently, the
only thing I know is that JPNIC doesn't do any bundling.

Regards,   Martin.


>He and probably everyone not present at the Delhi Registry Constituency 
>meeting when Edmund Chung and I urged Paul Twomey and Peter Dengate 
>Thrush ("ICANN Staff" hereafter) to consider variant strings in new gTLD 
>proposals so that the same user expectation could have been met and made 
>transparent and costless knows that this proposal was rejected, and by 
>whom. Peter and Paul responded immediately that each distinct sequence 
>of code points was (a) a separate application, and (b) potentially 
>awarded to separate applicants -- in their (incorrect) view, variant 
>strings were just another registry operator business exploit that we 
>were trying to get "for free".
>
>The real point here isn't that Peter and Paul need clue, rather that 
>anyone who contributes to the IDNA mailing list on _policy_, in 
>particular on registry policy, and generalizes from a very limited set 
>of knowledge and experience to some general rule, could ask if their 
>views are consistent with a larger body of knowledge and experience, 
>rather than assert their generalization as fact.
>
>I wouldn't take it amiss if everyone were to extend their agreement to 
>the proposition that variant strings for gTLD applications ought not to 
>cost the registry applicant an arm and a leg each, nor result in 
>separate parties, contracts and practices for two or more members of a 
>set of variant strings for a particular application string. Hitting 
>ICANN's greedbot that's currently demanding $185,000 per variant, plus 
>$75,000 per year per variant, with a large cluebat, would be slightly 
>more useful than complaining about registry greed and stupidity, which 
>is where Shawn's note about "all the variants of some IDN form of 
>mYdOmAiN.com", which started this thread, and the prior "doesn't scale" 
>notes by others earlier in related threads, depart.



#-#-#  Martin J. Du"rst, Assoc. Professor, Aoyama Gakuin University
#-#-#  http://www.sw.it.aoyama.ac.jp       mailto:duerst at it.aoyama.ac.jp     



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