IDN Variant Issues Project
Arabic Case Study Team
Conference Call
Monday 12 July, 2011 – 07:00-08:30 UTC 

Present on the call: 
Sarmad Hussein, Iftikhar Shah, Manal Ismail, Huda Sarfraz, Raed Al-Fayez, Fahd Batayneh, Abdulaziz Alzoman

ICANN staff/consultants: Baher Esmat, Andrew Sullivan

Team continued discussion of last week on issues around variants. Team discussed the sub-category A1.2.1.3 (re: 'hamza' and 'madda') in the document sent by Manal. There was a discussion on the character 'alef' with and without 'madda' in different Arabic languages. 

It was noted that whenever a new version of UNICODE comes along, there may be new code points added which may have an implication on variants under a specific script. It was also noted that policy at the Registry level as to what code points to allow is another element to consider in this regard. 

Moving from character level issues to label level issues the discussion moved toward Registry operation where the (.sa) Registry shared with the team how they handle variants at the second level. It was mentioned that if variants are to be allowed at the top-level, it would be recommended for the Registry to minimize the number of variant TLDs as much as possible because managing variant TLDs is very difficult. This raises the question of how to limit the number of variants and where the choice is. There seemed to be a distinction between 2 categories of variants (A1.1 vs A1.2 and A1.3 as per Manal's doc), where some variants may be needed to be delegated while others may be needed to be blocked. 

It was also mentioned that IETF is working on a technical solution to provide bundles as part of the DNS. Andrew made a clear statement that people must not wait for IETF to solve the problem. He added that form IETF perspective this fundamentally is a policy problem that needs to be dealt with at the Registry level, and while IETF may one day come up with some technology to deal with the problem, there is yet no magic solution. Andrew also talked about DNAME and highlighted few technical challenges for system admins to be able to manage variants. 

Team agreed that they would work on the rest of the agenda items via email. Fahd, Raed and Dr. Alzoman would look into DNSSEC. Manal and Iftikhar would look into UDRP.   

Team agreed to fix the call date and time to Tuesday 07:00AM UTC.