Mappings - some examples

[Alexander Mayrhofer]

> Can you give evidence for this space being "heavily 
> contaminated" by for example sending links to images on the 
> web where the ß is in use in domain names?

You know very well that we don't know the level of contamination, because it's all hidden by the client right now. I agree, it's probably not as bad as swapping the well known port assignments of http and smtp ;), but the scary thing about this change to deployed namespace is that we simply don't know.

The only numbers i could gather was Erik van Poel's statistics from Google's inventory of crawled host names - he came up with 0.00001% of the domain names containing an "ß" (compared to 0.00122% for "ü").

That could mean two things:

- Either there's really not just that much "web-contamination" (but how much is there elsewhere?)
- Or nobody is interested in using it anyway (because even though it works right now, nobody is doing it...)

> My experience from Sweden is that uptake for use of for 
> example 'ä' in domain names has just started although it has 
> been possible to use for many years now (in the .SE TLD) and 
> because of that my extrapolation of the situation is that it 
> is not at all "heavily" contaminated. And that the change, 
> although of course problematic, is very very similar to a 
> normal sunrise for a registry, and a normal marketing 
> campaign to the domain name holders.
>
> So if 'ä' would have been mapped in IDNA2003, and I now would 
> have been asked if I thought 'ä' should be introduced, I 
> would say "go for it, but speed up!!!".

Again, I think it's a *very* significant difference whether you open up a new part of a namespace, or you re-define the properties of existing namespace - re-definition is risky. Particularly if such a re-definition is combined with the effects of potentially incompatible mappings...

Alex