Draft on IDN Tables in XML

Andrew Sullivan ajs at anvilwalrusden.com
Wed Mar 14 19:39:38 CET 2012


On Wed, Mar 14, 2012 at 10:45:58AM -0400, Ram Mohan wrote:
> Kim,
> 
> I am not certain registries would want to use an automated/machine-readable
> mechanism for importing tables from other registry IDN implementations.

I strongly agree, and would go farther: I think it would be a bad idea
for registries to blindly import tables from other registries.

But registries are not the only people who may be interested in the
variant relationships in a registry.  For instance, the anti-abuse
community might reasonably want to use those tables as the basis for
constructing policies for what domains ought to be expected to be
delegated.  The anti-abuse community might want to use those tables to
detect opportunities for phishing, and to try to produce mitigation
strategies.  The corollary to using registry policy as the source of
sane IDN deployment is that clients need to be able to know what those
policies are, and to test actual network behaviour against the
policy.  In the absence of such tests, the registry policies aren't
enough.

The only way that applications are going to be able to integrate the
expected policies in their applications is if the policies can be
expressed in a machine-readable way.  If they can't be, then I predict
the policies will be "boutique" ones: some applications will work, but
others won't.  (This is written from the ICANN Universal Acceptance of
TLDs session, where I am keenly hoping this application perspective
will be expressed.)

Best,

A

-- 
Andrew Sullivan
ajs at anvilwalrusden.com


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