Re: [Idna-update] [I18nrp] Last Call: <draft-faltstrom-unicode11-05.txt> (IDNA2008 and Unicode 11.0.0) to Informational RFC

[Nico Williams <[e-mail]>]

On Fri, Dec 07, 2018 at 02:26:55AM -0500, John C Klensin wrote:
> While I tend to agree with Vint -- not because of smartness or
> the lack thereof but because many advertisers have, empirically,
> found it much cheaper to register a lot of domain names than to
> spend time and energy trying to protect trademarks, worrying
> about competitors trying to capture or squat on names, etc.--

But what has that got to do with whether advertisers are smart enough to
use domainnames in advertisements that users can type in?

> this is not a problem we need to solve.  There are many reasons

Good.  Not having to solve it is a big win.

> why we should encourage both registrants and registries to be
> conservative, whether the advice we give about conservatism

Indeed.  I've long been saying that registries should produce policies
appropriate to their domains.

> involves only the global criteria that Patrik believes (and I
> agree) should be primary or we expand that advice to include
> some or all of the considerations Larry, Asmus, and I have been
> advocating.  If the labels that are actually registered (whether
> actively used or not) are a subset of what our conservative
> guidance would suggest, that is great and no harm has been done.

Yes.  Registrants might not agree, but they can always negotiate with
the registries or pick a registry that works for them.

> On the other hand, we've seen names registered, and registered
> as SLDs as well as further down in the tree, that clearly won't
> meet even global criteria for conservatism and responsible
> behavior. much less guidance focused on relevant target
> communities.  Some of those registrations have clearly been the
> result of a shortage of thinking or an excess of cleverness or
> cuteness, not just the result of various forms of malice.  There
> has been a lot of the latter too and we can at least hope that
> more conservative registry policies would stop some of it.   So
> I don't think an argument that we don't need to say something
> (and say it very clearly) about the importance of conservative
> behavior holds up ... and I hope you were not intending to make
> that argument.

I only said that we shouldn't have to address the side-of-the-bus
problem.  You seem to have read into that more than I wrote, or perhaps
you're remembering things I've said before?

Registry policies that apply all the way down the tree would be an
innovation.  I'm not sure how I feel about that yet.  I do recognize the
problems with confusables, but as I've said before, that feels like a
losing battle.

Nico
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