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

Avri Doria avri at acm.org
Thu Nov 10 11:32:44 EST 2011


Hi,

I reject the accusation of ICANN Staff Bashing.  I see it as yet another new Political Correctness  directive to limit freedom of speech.  So sorry as much as I love many ICANN Staffers, I beleive that ICANN Staff, as corporate operational entity, is in error here and needs to be called on it.  I did not say they were bad people. 

When the ICANN Staff makes implementation decisions that are contrary to policy decisions, they should be called on it.  And no amount of Bashing Alleged Staff Bashers makes any difference to those discussions.  Yes, I expect it is mostly due to decisions by Senior ICANN Staff, and that most staffers are just following orders for fear of losing their jobs in a bad economy.  We have seen what happens in ICANN to those who disagree with senior management.  So the poor bashed ICANN Staffers have my sympathy, but I do not beleive that I am the ICANN Staff Basher.

In this case, the implementation on harmful confusing similarity goes beyond what is written in the Policy and is establishing Policy.    Those implementation decisions by ICANN has not been subject to adequate bottom-up process.  And in some cases it goes beyond what is written in the recommendations. Also the restriction against 2 character IDN ccTLD is not in Fast Track document which says: "1. the string must be a minimum of two characters long (U-label), " <http://www.icann.org/en/topics/idn/fast-track/idn-cctld-implementation-plan-16nov09-en.pdf>

Since this issue is not a topic in any of the ICANN groups as far as I know, e.g the At-Large where I think it belongs, I think it is good that as the problem becomes apparent to IGC, which is a major civil society aggregator, we discuss it here and that we take action on it.  I am hoping that At-Large and other groups may take up the topic in the near future, that is why I think we should forward any letter we may write to the ALAC as well as to the ICANN Board.

avri



On 10 Nov 2011, at 09:58, Tina Dam wrote:

> 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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