Re: [I18ndir] Study Group on Use of Emoji as Second Level Domain

[Harald Alvestrand <[e-mail]>]

The report to the board here at ICANN is that the study group is trying
to gather information on what the 18 ccTLDs that allow emoji
registration are doing to contain the damage from them, and that ICANN
is still solidly supporting restriction of 2nd level domains to the
IDNA2008 repertoire - but has no power to make policy for ccTLDs, the
strongest it can do is recommendations.


On 03/08/2019 11:15 AM, Martin J. Dürst wrote:
> Dear I18N Directorate members,
>
> I don't want to interrupt Harald's important work on our review, and 
> would like the topic of this mail to be treated as a separate topic, 
> with less priority.
>
> Because ICANN meets next week (starting already tomorrow my time, i.e. 
> already this Friday for some of you) in Kobe, Japan, I at one point was 
> considering attending. I had to abandon that plan because of other 
> committments, but as a result of looking at the schedule carefully, I 
> found the following:
>
> https://64.schedule.icann.org/meetings/962146
> ccNSO: Study Group on Use of Emoji as Second Level Domain
>
> I'm wondering whether anybody (maybe Patrik?) will be attending. I may 
> be able to dial in with Adobe Connect, but probably not for the whole 
> 1.5 hours.
>
> Any hints on which direction to contribute would be appreciated. I can 
> imagine any of the following (and more):
>
> - Don't worry, they'll never get anywhere anyway
> - Tell them in clear words that they aren't allowed to do that
> - Don't bother to tell them, they won't listen and care only about money
> - Ask whether they are serious, and what protocol changes they may need
> - Tell them about the 'minor' technical points they may not be aware of
> - Don't bother with dialing in, the session will be available as a video
>
> As for a summary of the technical situation as far as I know it:
>
> While IDNA 2003 allowed some symbol characters that are now considered 
> emoji, IDNA 2008 doesn't allow such characters. I haven't had time to 
> check UTR 46 or browsers and other applications. I'm not sure what the 
> group plans to discuss.
>
> The LDH principle would exclude emoji the same way it would exclude 
> $%#@& and friends. I'm sure I (as well as others) have in the past made 
> arguments against Unicode symbols based on the difficulty of entering 
> them; in many environments, in particular smart phones, that's no longer 
> the case.
>
> Emoji also would present a proofing ground for context-related 
> registration restrictions and techniques such as linking and blocking. 
> As an example, many things that appear to the user as a single emoji are 
> encoded as a sequence of several code points, but not all such sequences 
> produce reasonable results. One of the experiences of the Unicode 
> Consortium over the last few years is that certain technologies (from 
> things such as surrogate pairs upwards) get adopted much more quickly 
> when they are needed for emoji than when they are needed for some 
> minority language or script.
>
> Similarity is also in the eye of the beholder. As an example, I'd guess 
> most people wouldn't have big difficulties to distinguish two emoji 
> where one has a "light skin tone" modifier and the other has a "dark 
> skin tone" modifier (see 
> https://www.unicode.org/reports/tr51/#Diversity). But distinguishing 
> between "medium-light skin tone" and "medium skin tone", in particular 
> when only seeing one of the pair, will be very difficult. Also, to keep 
> all the different variations of smileys apart is a very tough job (at 
> least for me, YMMV).
>
> Regards,   Martin.


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