[82761] in North American Network Operators' Group
Re: Mozilla Implements TLD Whitelist for Firefox in Response to IDN
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Neil Harris)
Thu Jul 28 18:11:21 2005
Date: Thu, 28 Jul 2005 23:10:50 +0100
From: Neil Harris <neil@tonal.clara.co.uk>
To: John Levine <johnl@iecc.com>
Cc: nanog@nanog.org
In-Reply-To: <20050728200755.6684.qmail@xuxa.iecc.com>
Errors-To: owner-nanog@merit.edu
John Levine wrote:
>>>Homographs are a classical example of a PR attack. It's a complete
>>>non-issue.
>>>
>>>
>
>I am inclined to agree.
>
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>
>>But since the TLD registry operators can, and do, control the delegation
>>of their TLDs, they have de-facto control over the sets of labels that
>>can be used for second-level domain labels that are publically visible
>>within their TLD domains
>>
>>
>
>Indeed. The actual problem is that ICANN has been captured by the
>trademark community (WIPO, basically) and has internalized two bad
>ideas, that domains are like trademarks, and it is ICANN's job to
>protect them. Once the registrars and registries realized that this
>meant a thousand first-day registrations in a new domain (you may be
>sure that disney.xxx has been presold), there hasn't been any serious
>opposition so there are continuing inane arguments about how to
>prevent 2LD homographs, even as everyone agrees that it's impossible.
>
>Mozilla's approach strikes me as the least bad way to appease the
>trademark crazies without interfering too badly with useful work. I
>will be interested to see what they do when a cctld declares that
>their policy is that they permit any name.
>
>R's,
>John
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On the first point, yes, I agree, it's probably the least-worst solution.
On the second point: Mozilla, I imagine, would do nothing at all.
-- Neil
