On Thu, Jul 3, 2008 at 7:01 AM, John C Klensin <john-ietf(_at_)jck(_dot_)com>
wrote:
Any proposal for a new gTLD must satisfy a number of "string
criteria" that will be specified explicitly in the RFP,
including the requirements that the U-label must not:
(a) be identical to an existing TLD;
Is "сом" identical to "com"? (the first of these is U+0441
U+043E U+043C)
The current principle is that it should be be a "confusing string",
which is vague enough to cover the case above (but perhaps not able to
cover .co)
(b) be identical to a Reserved Name;
(c) consist of a single character;
I've heard it argued repeatedly that this is an unreasonable
rule for ideographic characters. I don't have an opinion, but
hope that ICANN has considered that case in full details.
This is where we dive into a discussion what is a "character". In
ideographic based language, there isnt a concept of a "word".
For example, Chinese, Japanese and Korean are actually "phonetics
language", and that ideograph characters are used to express the
phonetics. A "word" or more accurately "morphemes" can be express in a
single or more ideographs. A single latin character is unlikely to be
useful by itself (except of a and i) but thats not the case in CJK.
If the condition is that "no single ASCII character", I may be neutral
about it (since a single ideograph would never translate to a single
ASCII character in the zonefile, due to the xn-- prefix) but if the
"character" is defined more broadly to cover "U-label" character, then
I would have strong objections.
Incidentally, I remember it is a standing "tradition" that labels may
not be a single ascii character. But is there any technical reason we
should forbid it? (e.g. 6.cn have not kill any kittens yet)
-James Seng
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