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

[John C Klensin <[e-mail]>]

--On Friday, December 7, 2018 00:50 -0600 Nico Williams
<[e-mail]> wrote:

> On Fri, Dec 07, 2018 at 01:45:02AM -0500, Vint Cerf wrote:
>> > The ability to type in domainnames you see in ads is not
>> > that interesting for the obvious reason that advertisers
>> > would not choose to use domainnames that their targets
>> > cannot type in!
>> 
>> VGC: I am not so sure advertisers are that smart...
> 
> I am quite certain that they are, or if not, will be.  They
> spend lots of money, and they hate to spend it badly.  They
> even spend lots of money on how to spend lots more money well.

Nico,

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.--
this is not a problem we need to solve.  There are many reasons
why we should encourage both registrants and registries to be
conservative, whether the advice we give about conservatism
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.

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.

best,
    john