European Commission: Linda Corugedo Steneberg.docx
From an e-mail sent to the T&T list by Chris Dillon on 12 Feb., 2014.
Background
Linda Corugedo Steneberg is Director of the European Commission's Communications networks, Content and Technologies Directorate-General, DG CONNECT Cooperation, Directorate D. The EU manages .eu in all languages of the EU, including Greek and Bulgarian, including the registration of domain names.
"Registrants should be given the opportunity to submit data to the Registrar in his own language when registering a domain name.
From our experience, there might be extra costs for some of the involved parties (like the Registry, the Registrars and/or ICANN in the GNSO environment), but that should be budgeted in the ultimate interest of the end users."
It would be worth knowing exactly what those costs are for (transliteration or translation, which fields, verification etc.) and how substantial they are. There are also suggestions about who pays, i.e.
"Registries should bear the cost of translation and transliteration of Registrar data, and Registrars should bear the cost of translation and transliteration of registrant data. As indicated above, this is the cost of making business. The additional cost should be budgeted in the interest of end users. The transliteration and translation should not have, in any case, an effect on the final price that Registrants bear."
The last sentence may not necessarily be the case if the registrars and registries are for some reason not able to subsidise the increased costs foreign language work will cause.
A homogeneous WHOIS (i.e. IRD) resource is quoted as a benefit of transliterating/translating. Using a common language facilitates registration when registrants do not share one. Consultation of data by law enforcement et al. requires a common language. These benefits should be added to our wiki as answers to some of the questions.
"Registrants would have full rights when it comes to respect for multilingualism" would mean that registrars would need to be able to process applications in a wide range of languages, in this case it's the EU languages. It could be argued that this is a special case and that many registries would not need to process applications in such a wide range of languages. It may be useful to think through some scenarios, for example, involving applications for domain names in scripts applied for in countries where there is little experience with the script in question.
"Validation will be more cumbersome provided there is no translation or transliteration" What is being validated? That the non-ASCII label is what it says it is, or that the transliteration/translation is correct?
