AyeShil Jeon <asjeon@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
I have no idea exactly what your point is. Would you clarify it?
Suppose a registry supports languages X and Y, and suppose that one person wants to register label x1 (tagged with language X), and another person wants to register label x2 (tagged with language X), and suppose that x1 and x2 would not be considered equivalent by people whose native language is X, but would be considered equivalent by people whose native language is Y. If the registration-blocking mechanism pays attention to the tags, it will allow both x1 and x2 to be registered, missing an opportunity to prevent confusion among Y-speaking users, and missing an opportunity to prevent a dispute that may arise when the registrants discover that Y-speakers have started visiting their sites and are getting them confused.
Therefore I suggest that when a registry is deciding which names should be blocked in a given zone, it should use all the variant tables that are relevant to that zone, paying no attention to any language tags belonging to individual names.
Here's an example of how a registry might decide whether to admit a name. Suppose the zone supports a set L of languages. For each language in L, there is a function Valid(language;label) that checks whether the label is valid in that language, and another function TooClose(language;label1,label2) that checks whether two labels are confusingly similar in that language.
I suggest that the registration of a new label be allowed if
(1) Valid(language;label) is true for at least one language in L, and
(2) TooClose(language;label,existing_label) is never true for any existing label, for any language in L.
Notice that the language tags of the names never come into play for deciding what blocks what. Language tags might still be used for other purposes, though, like pricing and the domain management user interface.
It might be possible to combine the per-language tables into larger tables, but that's an implementation detail.
Edmon Chung <edmon@xxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
For example, given a domain registration for a domain with lang:eng the french registry and the german registry may have different set of variants, while the swiss registry might want to use the superset from both for reserved variants.
I think that's fine. I have no problem with tagging an entire zone as "French" or "German" or "French and German". It's tags on individual names that I'm worried about. I have no problem with a zone using its own custom rule for what blocks what, as long as that rule is applied uniformly to all names in the zone. But if the zone applies one blocking rule to some names in the zone, and another blocking rule to other names in the zone, I worry that the system will be both harder to understand and less effective at preventing confusion and disputes.
AMC