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

[Tina Dam]

Hi Avri, thanks for the report from me as well.

But, I must say though that I am very surprised about your bashing of
ICANN Staff. I obviously really do not like that and I don't find it
useful at all. If that is what this list is for then it certainly is
not for me.

Avri, you of all people must know how hard ICANN staff works to follow
processes and work with all the different stakeholder groups to ensure
fair implementation - yes that is, through the bottom-up processes.

In terms of implementing the Fast Track Process this was done via
countless meetings and online public forums etc discussing and
reviewing several proposed implementation plans that follows the
policy papers and reports provided by the community. You were in
several of those meetings.

Certainly it is never possible to fulfill every single persons
requests, but I think we got really really close and so did others.
Alternatively the implementation would have not been approved.

About the restriction against any 2-char that resembles ASCII
characters - this has to do with the history of how country-codes are
decided upon. That is, via the ISO list. It may not be a very useful
restriction, but a new ICANN process should not be against an already
existing process. If this is to changed then an agreement must be made
with ISO that ICANN can use such 2-char combinations and that ISO is
not delegating them in the future.

That may be more logically, but until this has been decided upon I
really see no issue with ICANN having that limitation. I could never
be certain, but I would guess the conversation on this list would have
been completely different if an ICANN process would cause issues for
example for the ISO list and their future implementations on that
list.

Tina


On Thu, Nov 10, 2011 at 5:27 AM, Avri Doria <avri at acm.org> wrote:
> Hi,
>
> I was in Bulgaria for the domain.forun at which Rod spoke.
>
> Of course I do not know what Rod and Parvanov spoke about.  But in other statements Rod, and Veni both made, they hid behind the bottom-up process and stated that it was rejected because of the bottom-up process and said that if the Bulgarians and Greeks wanted to change the rules they needed to go back to the ccNSO.  It is amazing how many time they invoked bottom-up process to defend unpopular Staff decisions - it was the mantra of the day.
>
> Of course they never spoke of what bottom-up decisions they were talking about.  Was there a bottom-up decision about what sort of things were confusing similar?  Was there a bottom-up decision about a lack of transparency and the absence of an appeal of an arbitrary decision or an extended review procedure?  No, these are ICANN implementation details.  I was an observer of the ccNSO group that made recommendations, and these issues never came up.  And for the GNSO, no matter how much the bottom-up process has requested an extended review for confusing similarity, it has been rejected by the ICANN Staff.  ICANN Staff has decided on its own that it is supreme when it comes to harmful confusing similarity.  I remember no bottom-up decisions giving ICANN staff supremacy in any topic, let alone this one.
>
> Another disturbing thing came up during these meetings.  There was a new notion introduced by those who spoke for ICANN.  I must note that I may have misunderstood it because some of it came from ICANN Staffers speaking in Bulgarian so I only heard a translation, but it sounded like the following:
>
> In any review of Cyrillic or Greek characters, not only do they have to  worry about existing LDH (letter digit hyphen) ASCII TLDs, but also myst complete with potential LDH ASCII that might be applied for some day.  This notion was extend not only to un-allocated ISO 2 character designations but to any Cyrillic or Greek TLD that may look similar to LDH characters.
>
> I.e. the notion I got out was that if the Cyrillic or Greek looks anything like ASCII, they can't have it.  ASCII trumps all. While this is bad, considering the stretch ICANN Staff makes when making these decision (б looks like b - really???), it is really awful. From the discussions I understood this would apply in gTLDS as much as it does in ccTLDs.
>
> If I understood correctly, this is a bad thing, and this issue of .бг is just the tip of the iceberg of a really serious defect in the ICANN process for new TLDs.
>
> avri
>
>
>
>
> On 9 Nov 2011, at 10:06, Kleinwächter, Wolfgang wrote:
>
>> As I can see from the ICANN website, ICANNs Rod Beckstrom had a meeting with the Bulgarian president Mr. Parvanow, the day before yesterday (November 7). Did the Bulgarian president raise the issue of .bg and what was Beckstroem response?
>>
>> Thanks
>>
>> wolfgang
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