GNSO IDN Sao Paulo Meeting Minutes

GNSO IDN Working Group Meeting São Paulo
3 December 2006

Draft by Olof Nordling

1. Introduction
The meeting was chaired by Bruce Tonkin in Ram Mohan’s absence.
Participants: Edmon Chung, June Seo, Jon Bing, Marilyn Cade, Greg Ruth, Pat Kane, Hakon Haugnes, David Maher, Sophia Bekele, Alistair Dixon, Tony Holmes, Werner Straub.
Remote, by phone: Yoav Keren, Cary Karp.
ICANN staff: Donna Austin, Tina Dam, Liz Williams, Glen de Saint-Géry, Olof Nordling.

2. Overview of the GNSO IDN Working Group (WG) Charter
The Chair reiterated the Charter wording adopted on 16 November. Main work objective is to inform the GNSO on what the possible policy issues are, taking into account the Bylaw conditions for policy issues justifying a PDP. The electronic ballot election for the WG Chair resulted in a majority for Ram Mohan. The WG confirmed the election by show of hands.

3. Overview of documents to review
Olof Nordling introduced briefly the three documents identified for review according to the Charter, notably the Draft Final Report on New gTLDs, the Draft IDN Issues Report and the RFC 4690. Relevant excerpts of these documents, plus the ICANN IDN Guidelines, had been compiled in a single document, emailed to the WG earlier and handed out as paper copies at the meeting.

4. Update on recent developments
Tina Dam presented slides of ICANN’s overall program for IDN, highlighting status and planning for the technical tests and for IETF’s IDNA protocol revision.
Conditions to fulfill before IDNs can be inserted in the root include
a) tests demonstrate no negative impact,
b) agreement from DoC and
c) acceptance from RSSAC.
Autonomica has been appointed to perform laboratory tests - test plans have been developed and test strings selected. Details on these developments will soon be published, with a public comment period. The tests cover IDN strings in NS records in a closed environment for testing server software. If successful, live tests will follow including applications testing - this is a discussion point for the Presidents Advisory Committee in Sao Paulo. Relations with the root server community are important and entertained at IETF meetings as well as through the RSSAC liaison.
A revision of the IDNA protocol is underway in the IETF and closely followed by ICANN staff. The original protocol from 2003 was based on Unicode 3.2 and prompted the first ICANN IDN Guidelines. Experience has shown a need for a review, going from an exclusion based to an inclusion based approach, using Unicode version 5.0 instead of version 3.2. This approach enables future character additions in a more secure way. Three recently published Internet drafts suggest solutions to issues raised in RFC 4690. The revision will call for upgrades for those using IDN already. The foreseen weeding out of confusable characters is based on visual confusability, but confusion due to extreme fonts in applications may still occur. Further IDN events in Sao Paulo include a tutorial 3 December and a workshop 6 December.

5. Draft work plan
The Chair proposed that the Workin Group (WG) members should successively provide input to a working list of policy issues for staff to compile. Issues in the list should be checked against the New gTLD Recommendations and other documents. Remaining issues should be screened against the Bylaws criteria for launch of PDP and, if passing, be prioritized in consultation with the GNSO Council for potential initiation of a PDP. The work should be concluded by the ICANN meeting in Lisbon end March 2007. The meeting agreed to this work outline.

6. Substance discussions

a) The Chair brought up suggestions expressed in RFC 4690, including a potential review of the UDRP, for which Olof Nordling undertook to report back to the WG on IDN UDRP cases already handled by WIPO.

A first roundtable input session followed, summary points grouped by topics:

b) Translations of gTLDs have been covered in the new gTLD discussions, concluding that no prior rights exist on that basis, but also transliterations should be addressed. This relates to the issue in the new gTLD discussions on whether confusability should cover phonetic similarity. It involves complexities, as, for example, Chinese characters offer no clear cut solutions for transliterations or translations - they depend on context as well as on community expectations.

c) Waiting for the test results could potentially delay the new gTLD process - this is a high-level issue to address in discussions with the Board.

d) With or without a DNAME solution, the issue of whether aliases of TLDs are advisable should be addressed. The notion of semantic equivalence to existing gTLDs should also be considered.

e) Should an existing domain name holder have a priority right for a corresponding domain in another script? Given a particular script on the top-level, should that script be compulsory on lower level also? Would that be enforceable, as a policy should be?

f) There are potential political issues in the use of scripts, as some countries/regions claim “rights” to the standards for their scripts. Technical or practical reasons for excluding some scripts/languages may also raise political issues.

g) A recent ITU document states that policy for a country’s ccTLD cannot be decided by another country. In analogy with this, should a country opting for a gTLD be free to set policies for the second level? This also indicates that other documents than those listed in the Charter could be considered as compulsory reading for the WG, e.g. a document on alternative ways to run DNS with internationalized domain names.

h) There are around 2 million IDN SLDs today, for which a protocol change may cause problems and “grandfathering” options should be considered. Application software may also raise issues for “grandfathering”. The handling of technical problems due to protocol changes raises proportionality issues. Design criteria in protocol revision foresee grandfathering.

i) Possible requirements for change of Whois should be considered. IDN cases of variants may be complex and issues regarding the second level should be addressed - e.g. when a domain name holder may claim rights for second level domains in other TLDs.

7. Planning for the IDN part of the GNSO Open Forum
In the GNSO Open Forum, Bruce Tonkin will inform about the Charter, the formation of the WG and the WG’s objectives and timeline.

8. AOB
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