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

[Karl Auerbach]

I am constantly amused by the "confusingly similar" logic.  It is a
logic that has been fabricated into the domain name context to serve
goals that have nothing to do with whether people will be confused.

Whether two strings of glyphs on a screen are "similar", much less
whether they are "confusingly similar" is *not* a technical question.

"Confusingly similar" is a legal question, with cultural, moral, social,
political, economic, and historical overtones.

In other words it is exactly the kind of highly contextual and
subjective question that ICANN was never intended to handle.

And, consequently, it is the kind of question that ICANN has
demonstrated that ICANN is unable to handle.

(ICANN's own structure - a structure that gives little voice, and only a
meager and crippled kind of a vote, to the bulk of the those who might
be "confused", i.e. internet users - renders suspect even those
approaches that ICANN does occasionally emit.)

ICANN was created to do other jobs, jobs well worth doing:

ICANN's role in the domain name system was intended to be that of
assuring the technical stability of the upper tiers of DNS.

And that, to be specific, means dealing with issues that have a direct
impact upon the ability of the net efficiently and quickly to turn DNS
query packets into DNS reply packets with a low error rate, and without
prejudice against any query question or query source.

ICANN has been used by the trademark industry as a pawn to facilitate
their own goals - the benefit of the community of internet users not
being among those goals.  The phrase "confusingly similar" comes right
out of the law of trade and service marks.

Existing registries have been more than willing to go along because the
longer that ICANN engages in social engineering the longer their revenue
streams will remain insulated from competitive pressures.

It is long past time - in fact about 13 years past time - since ICANN
should have shaken off the pressures to do social engineering and
returned to the job that is was intended to do, and which it has never
really done, which is to assure that the upper tiers of DNS operate with
the reliability and quality of a lifeline grade utility.

ICANN's job is to make sure that the DNS lights stay on - It is not
ICANN's concern whether those lights illuminate a surgeon saving a life
or light-up a billboard advertising a lucrative drug to grow hair.

It is a cliche - as if anything from Voltaire could be a cliche - that
is appropriate for our situation with ICANN:

    "The perfect is the enemy of the good".

There are many who do not want innovation in the DNS space - for example
Verisign and the trademark protection industry (of which I am a
dues-paying member) very much like the status quo.  And many
governmental agencies fear change that DNS innovation might bring.

ICANN does not well distinguish between "the perfect" and "the good".
Consequently these groups know that even a pebble of feigned concern
will throw ICANN into cycles of study, delay, and expansion - all of
which serves the goals of those who benefit from stasis.

It is sad that ICANN does not give the same weight to the spirit of
innovation that it gives to concocted fears.

	--karl--



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