Incomplete quote on the future of IDN TLDS
When asked by an Internet-friend whether there will be single-character TLDs in IDN and non-IDN, I responded. My response was quoted incompletely In the Warrens’ Washington Internet Daily as:
“I think you will definitely get [China/Japan/Korea] single-character IDN TLDs, both country-code and generic,” said Avri Doria, an ICANN participant and adjunct professor at Lulea University of Technology in Sweden. Some think this is enough — except for .A., .E and .I — since these languages are the only ones with single character words, she said. Latin and ASCII IDNs will “keep dangling for a long while, except for the few that aregrand-fathered in and which serve as proof of there being no technical problems,” she said.
In additon to having done me the favor of cleaning up my language, a middle sentence was dropped which I beleive makes the quote incomplete. This is of course a subjective opinion and I did give the author the right to quote me without any request of how. But I figured I would put the whole quote in a blog, just so it was out there.
i think you will definitely get CJK single character IDN TLDs, both cc and G (some in JIG argue for this since it is obvious, and some of those think this is just enough since they are the only one who have single character words. well except for A, E and I.)
you may get single character non Latin IDN (some in JIG argue for this since they are not from CJK but still don’t use Latin letters)
and Latin IDN and ASCII Letter will keep dangling for a long while, except for the few that are grandfathered in and which serve as proof of there being no technical problem.
Another issue came up in regard to another ICANN Board decision reportedly made last night:
d. Approval of RSEP Request for Allocation of 1 and 2-Character Domains in .TRAVEL
Whereas, Tralliance submitted a request pursuant to ICANN’s Registry Services Evaluation Policy to amend the .TRAVEL Registry Agreements to allocate one and two-character domain names via a phased allocation process.
Whereas, the proposed release of single and two-character domain names in .TRAVEL would be consistent with the recommendations of the GNSO Reserved Names Working Group and other approvals to permit the release of one and two-character domain names.
Whereas, ICANN has evaluated the proposed amendment to the .TRAVEL Registry Agreement as new registry services pursuant to the Registry Services Evaluation Policy and has posted amendments for public comment and Board approval (http://www.icann.org/registries/rsep/).
RESOLVED (2010.08.05.06), the .TRAVEL amendment is approved, and the President and General Counsel are authorized to take such actions as appropriate to implement the amendments.
In my informal comments, I went on to mention:
On single letter, there is an interesting question as to whether they might be representational of sovereign states since many are used to represent countries in auto license plates (The coding system for car license plates under the 1949 and 1968 United Nations Road Traffic Conventions ). and since ICANN is bending over backwards to every whim and desire of the sovereigns among us, they probably should be reserved and in fact may already be reserved by the language in DAGv4. But then, one might ask what about the second level - should they be also be protected under the current new gTLD regime? are they already? oh isn’t there is a RSTEP on this?
O, U, W, X weren’t assigned as far as I can tell and R and Y are not used. i don’t think any diacriticals were assigned.
The reference to DAGv4 is a reference to the Full Draft Applicant Guidebook, version 4 (we are no longer supposed to call it DAG because DAG is a scatological word in Australian - part of the ICANN Purify the Language Program). In section (2.2.1.4.1 Treatment of Country or Territory Names) the following note is included:
Country and territory names are excluded from the process based on advice from the Governmental Advisory Committee in recent communiqués providing interpretation of Principle 2.2 of the GAC Principles regarding New gTLDs to indicate that strings which are a meaningful representation or abbreviation of a country or territory name should be handled through the forthcoming ccPDP, and other geographical strings could be allowed in the gTLD space if in agreement with the relevant government or public authority.
I can only assume that the 1949 and 1968 United Nations Road Traffic Conventions are “meaningful representations” and that the ICANN implementation team has just not been made aware of them yet. I look forward to future conversations on this detail.
