[governance] Is really Bulgarian Cyrillic .бг (.bg) similar to other Latin ccTLDs?

[Daniel Kalchev]

On 03.11.11 12:57, Carlos A. Afonso wrote:
> Hi Norbert, I agree mostly anything (except perhaps formal binding
> contracts) can be overridden, but I see no signs of a proposal which
> would convince Icann to change decisions already made.

Problem is, there is no decision, by anyone, on this subject. There is 
only this 'expert' opinion about confusability, floating around.

If there was a decision, there would already be appeal or other process 
to challenge it. There is, an year and a half already, social 
engineering effort to convince Bulgaria to withdraw it's request for .бг.

> E.g, how about proposing that cyrillic ccTLDs have three instead of two
> chars, using ISO 3166-1 alpha-3 instead of alpha-2? Anathema, great,
> whatever, but were are the concrete proposals on the table? This is why
> I posed the question with my implicit view that this might not change if
> concrete, sound proposals are not submitted and enable consensus.

There is already research to permit 'single letter' IDN labels in the 
root. It appears that the opinion so far is that this should not be a 
problem. My guess is, there is already an IDN gTLD ... customer... that 
demonstrated such demand.

The original IDN Fast Track procedure had quite different idea, than the 
actual implementation. Under the original idea, it was not ICANN's 
business to decide what labels are acceptable. There were many 
proposals, from various international bodies, including the ISO 3166 
committee (of which ICANN is a member) to produce an "IDN list of 
country codes". All of these were denied by ICANN. The obvious reason at 
the time was that "it will take too much time", but then, the IDN Fast 
Track proposal already took too much time.

The ISO 3166-1 list is just that -- a list of codes that countries 
agreed to identify each of them (using one procedure or another). There 
is no anonymous 'linguistic expert panel' that has veto rights or such. 
The process is slow but stable and quite predictable. I believe at some 
point ISO3166 will have IDN codes as well, soon or later, with our 
without ICANN. Since these codes are used for many more things than 
domain names on Internet, it is likely ICANN will have no say in this 
process at all. But one day, there will be these codes in the ISO3166 
list. Guess what will be the code for Bulgaria.

I am little confused by your proposal though: are you suggesting that 
Cyrillic and perhaps Greek alphabet strings for the root (because, we 
talk about a ccTLD now, but the requirements should be the same for 
anything in DNS, right?) should be at least three characters long, as to 
reduce the probability of being confused by a similarly looking Latin 
alphabet strings?

Daniel


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