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FINAL VERSION TO BE SUBMITTED IF RATIFIED

Please click here to download a copy of the PDF below.

The final version to be submitted, if the draft is ratified, will be placed here shortly. 

FINAL DRAFT VERSION TO BE VOTED UPON BY THE ALAC

The final draft version to be voted upon by the ALAC will be placed here by 07.12.2012 20:00 UTC.

The ALAC thanks the IDN Variant TLD (Project 6) team for publishing the Interim Report on Examining the User Experience Implications of Active Variant TLDs for public comments.  First of all, the ALAC commends the generally thorough stocktaking of issues related to user experience of IDN Variant TLDs presented by the Interim Report.  At the same time, the ALAC makes the observation, which the document also touches on, that these issues may be mitigated against by registry policy measures along with relevant materials and resources for users (including administrative and technical users).

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1. In considering the presented potential issues, and how the ICANN community can mitigate against them, the team should provide better clarity to distinguish between 1. Issues that can and should be implemented as ICANN policies (e.g. directly through Registries and Registrars); 2. Issues for which ICANN policies have stronger influence (e.g. recommendations for registrants); and 3. Issues which ICANN and the ICANN community would produce materials and conduct outreach to raise awareness (e.g. guidelines for the technical community or the legal community).
   
   
2. Guidelines and recommendations sensitive to linguistic communities are important and thus should be developed with consultation from and best through bottom-up processes by the affected linguistic communities.  More importantly, to identify critical aspects that should be implemented as requirements for IDN TLD registries.  For example, in the Chinese IDN Variant TLD case, the statistics in the report showed that close to 20% of queries are directed towards the IDN Variant TLD. This means that there is 1 user using the IDN variant TLD for every 4 users using the primary IDN TLD.  This presents strong evidence that ICANN should implement policies to require all Chinese IDN TLD registries to serve the preferred variant as the IDN Variant TLD, to ensure both consistency in the root and a reasonable user experience and consumer trust for IDN TLDs.
   
   
3. Separate guidelines and recommendations should be developed for different linguistic communities.  As evidenced in the report, the requirements and needs of different linguistic communities for IDN Variant TLDs are different from each other.  All the relevant policies, guidelines and recommendations should be developed with consultation and through bottom-up processes by the affected language communities.

FIRST DRAFT SUBMITTED

The current first version is as follows:

ALAC thanks the IDN Variant TLD (Project 6) team for publishing the Interim Report on Examining the User Experience Implications of Active Variant TLDs for public comments.  First of all, ALAC commends the generally thorough stocktaking of issues related to user experience of IDN Variant TLDs presented by the Interim Report.  At the same time, ALAC makes the observation, which the document also touches on, that these issues may be mitigated against by registry policy measures along with relevant materials and resources for users (including administrative and technical users).

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