Introduction by Staff
The ALAC Statement on the Final Report on Three-Character Requirement and Variant Management was originally drafted by James Seng, Member of the At-Large Advisory Committee and Chair of the At-Large working group on IDN Policy. The original text was made available for At-Large community feedback on December 19th 2009.
The present version of this document (revision 1) was prepared by James Seng on January 10th, 2010 and incorporates comments received from the At-Large community on the original version. You may click here to compare the two versions.
The Chair of the ALAC asked the At-Large Staff to start a five-day ALAC vote on the document on January 11th, 2010 and to send the staff person responsible for the public consultation on the Final Report on Three-Character Requirement and Variant Management a note indicating that the document is currently undergoing the ALAC ratification process.
The online vote on this Statement will end on January 16th, 2010.
(end of introduction)
ALAC Statement on Final Report on Three-Character Requirement and Variant Management
ALAC is please to see progress made on the three character requirement and variant management for IDN TLD implementation. We appreciate the hard work by IDN TLD Implementation working team.
ALAC has reviewed the Final Report on Three-Character Requirement and Variant Management and the followings are our comments:
General Positions
1. ALAC believes that every culture and language is unique. Attempts to uniformly apply rules and restrictions across cultures and languages would inevitably lead to maladministation. Therefore, ICANN should be flexible in adopting different policy for different culture and language in its implementation of IDN policy.
2. ALAC recommend that ICANN removes its three-character requirement for IDN TLDs. The historical context whereby such restrictions for ASCII/English is no longer relevant to today implementation of IDN TLDs.
3. ALAC agree that ICANN should have variant management at the top level. In some cultures, certain strings are considered the "same" by the community and that ICANN rules should be consistent with what is considered norm within that culture.
Three-Character Restriction in gTLD Strings
4. ALAC noted the recommendation of the working team and encourage ICANN undertakes the study for potential impact of relaxing the restriction on the allocation of one-character IDN TLD labels as soon as possible, hopefully before finalization of the Draft Application Guidebook.
Variant Management
5. ALAC recommend that applicants who requested Type 1 or 2 Desired Variant Labels must treat Desired Variant Labels as equivalent to Base IDN TLD Label for all intend and purposes. Applicants may not charge additional fees to registrants and registrars for Desired Variant Labels TLD.
6. ALAC support the recommendation that DNAME to be used as the preferred mechanism for variant delegation but ALAC believes ICANN should retain the flexible to delegate Desired Variant Labels using NS should it choose to.
James Seng
ALAC, IDN Liaison
Thanks James for putting together those comments.
I would like to support your proposal.
Maybe a short conf call will allow a more productive exchange.
I would like also to concur with your comment on the idea of “one size fit all”.
And it is true for a lot of the current work done within ICANN.
It seems that ICANN as a single organization want to deal with every subject (like new gTLDs) in forming one single policy. In our complex world it is almost impossible.
Sébastien
contributed by sebastien.bachollet@isoc.fr on 2009-12-21 09:09:15 GMT
very clear commnents - Thanks James.I will send the link to the board. In June this year in China we had the opportunity to debate all these issues you put properly into words . best Vanda
contributed by guest@socialtext.net on 2009-12-21 19:33:47 GMT
I assume the title of the third section "Three-Character Restriction in gTLD Strings" does not really match its content, which is regarding relaxing restriction of one-character TLDs. Since there are lawsuits going on against ICANN on exclusion of single-letter domain names. I don't believe the relaxation at top-level will be feasible to ICANN at this stage.
Commented by Hong Xue.
contributed by guest@socialtext.net on 2009-12-22 05:58:55 GMT
Hong, do you have any references/links to the lawsuit against ICANN on single-letter domain?
contributed by james@seng.sg on 2009-12-22 06:14:44 GMT
