Mapping and Variants

[Martin Duerst]

At 11:29 09/03/09, John C Klensin wrote:
>
>
>--On Monday, March 09, 2009 10:27 +0900 Martin Duerst
><duerst at it.aoyama.ac.jp> wrote:
>
>> Sorry, I didn't mean 'prohibit' as legislate, but as "the
>> registries should do it themselves in everybody's best
>> interest". Also, I didn't mean that e.g. having Cyrillic
>> labels and Arabic labels in the same zone would be bad, just
>> that having different scripts in the same label (in particular
>> for Latin, Cyrillic, and Greek) would be bad. Therefore, I'm
>> still waiting for John to confirm that his example has been
>> just theoretical, or to explain why not.
>
>The example, if I'm correctly identifying the one you are
>referring to, was not theoretical,

I mean the example where you said that we have to map Latin
lower case a and Greek lower case alpha to the same thing
because their two upper case versions look the same.

My point was that this is mainly theoretical, because mixing
scripts in general, and very much in this case, is a bad idea,
nonwithstanding examples where it actually might make some sense,
such as $B&L(Bvolt. Can you give an example that makes a bit more
sense than just "AA"?

Regards,   Martin.

>but the main issue is that it
>is very hard (or meaningless) for the WG to try to tell zones
>what to do.  Remember that there are tens of millions of zones
>out there.  ICANN can control about a dozen in theory and about
>250 more by some stretch of optimistic imagination.   Beyond
>that, decisions are going to get made by local zone
>administrators based on what they think serves the needs of the
>registrants, users, or enterprise-owners of their zones.
>
>If we think something is important enough that it should be a
>DNS-wide rule, we need to incorporate it into the registration
>protocol.  If we think it is important enough that it should be
>enforced or followed even if registries have inclinations to the
>contrary, then it needs to be a protocol rule that is checked at
>lookup.  For anything else, we run into the fact that people
>have asserted that Latin and Cyrillic characters are used
>together often enough in Russia and it is necessary to permit
>them together in labels.  I would advise against that, you would
>advise against that, probably even the current RU TLD registry
>would advise against that, but it doesn't prevent the claim from
>being made and probably won't prevent some third- or
>fourth-level registry from doing it if they think it is
>interesting.  Conversely, as a purely hypothetical example (see
>below) I would strongly advise against permitting registration
>of toys-$B'q(B-us (the middle character is SMALL LETTER YA, U+044F),
>especially in a broad-scope-registration gTLD, not just because
>of the script mixing but because it would require a debate about
>whether it ought to be bundled with toys-r-us.  
>
>But, if the registry permitted mixed-script registrations at
>all, even for Japanese (which, as you have pointed out, is one
>of the important cases and one unlikely to actually cause
>confusion), then, if the relevant hypothetical company had
>decided it wanted the name,  I would expect its lawyers to show
>up at the doorstep of the registry pointing to its trademarks,
>claiming the "right" to register that name, and probably
>claiming that they had already been done irreparable harm by not
>being permitted to register Toys"R"Us by some obscure technical
>rule dating from long before any self-respecting lawyer had
>heard of the Internet.   I don't know how that discussion would
>come out (I actually have reason to that real Toys"R"Us is
>smarter than to drag itself into something like this, which is
>why the example is hypothetical), but I think we would all be
>very relieved that the WG didn't have to be part of it.
>
>So we know some cases, like Japanese, in which mixed-script
>registrations are necessary for practical use of the DNS.  We
>know some other cases where it will certainly be claimed that
>such registrations are necessary (and, for a hypothetical
>manufacturer of electronic equipment, the Greek-Latin examples I
>gave are actually not that far-fetched... at third or fourth
>level registrations, even if not at second or TLD level).  And
>we know that a debate with an administrator of such a
>manufacturer zone about whether or not $B&L(Bvolt should be
>permitted isn't going to get us anywhere that we want to be. I
>predict we will have enough problems with the mathematical site
>that wants to use "$B".(B-null" as a label (flunks at least the
>IDNA2003 Bidi tests) or U+05DO U+0030 (Aleph followed (to the
>right) by digit zero, which my system won't even let me type,
>and those run into Bidi rules, not just script-mixing ones.
>
>Net, I think we need to strongly recommend that registries/zones
>not permit script mixing unless the particular cases involved
>are heavily enough used in their cultures to be both important
>and non-problematic.  Someone may need to point out to various
>consumer protection and law enforcement agencies that ignoring
>that recommendation can lead to bad stuff.  But I don't see any
>basis for going further, nor any way to do it unless we are
>going to insert our judgment between registries and the lawyers
>for folks who want to represent trademarks or terms of art that
>use mixed scripts and then to start making lists of permitted
>cases.
>
>    john


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