[apps-discuss] ICANN Variant Issues Project case study reports

[Andrew Sullivan <[e-mail]>]

No hat.

Dear colleagues,

I'm going to send related messages to four IETF lists where I suspect
there might be people who are interested: dnsext, dnsop, apps-discuss,
and idna-update.  My apologies to those of you who get it more than
once.

For those of you who have been following or otherwise interested in
the ICANN Variant Issues Project, the case study reports are up.  The
public comment period is open until 14 November.  The Project is aimed
at sorting out, for some scripts, what people mean when they talk
about "variant names" in the DNS.

I bring this to the attention of the Applications Area, because of the
interest the discussion about DNS aliasing evinced when we raised it
in the Area meeting some time ago.  In my reading, two of the reports
are quite clearly in favour of some sort of technique to make
different DNS names apparently act as one; another is non-committal,
but appears to have use of those techniques as one possible
consequence.  In my view, these reports do not make strong technical
recommendations, but they outline the reasons why these behaviours are
desirable.

As a matter of full disclosure, I point out that I have been involved
with these reports, providing some observations about the (technical)
feasibility of various things people wanted to do.  I provided advice,
but of course the teams actually responsible for the reports were free
to do as they wished with my advice (including ignore it).

I encourage those of you who are interested in the topic to read the
reports and make any comments you think are useful in the public
comment forum, or (for that matter) by discussing things on the open
ICANN list devoted to the project
(https://mm.icann.org/mailman/listinfo/vip).  Note that the usual
ICANN processes don't include the discussion on the mailing list as
public comments, so if you want your comments to be considered
formally, you'll need to post them in the appropriate area.

Best regards,

Andrew

-- 
Andrew Sullivan
[e-mail]