Subject: Re: [DNSOP] IAB statement: "The interpretation of rules in the ICANN gTLD Applicant Guidebook"

From: Stephane Bortzmeyer <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 9 Feb 2012 14:04:43 +0100

On Wed, Feb 08, 2012 at 02:03:31PM -0800,
 IAB Chair <[email-masked]> wrote 
 a message of 116 lines which said:

> The IAB has issued a statement entitled "The interpretation of rules
> in the ICANN gTLD Applicant Guidebook".

This is a very bad statement. When work started on document
draft-liman-tld-names, there were no IDN TLD in the root and some
expressed concern that the digits (in their Punycode encoding) could
create a problem. Also, draft-liman-tld-names was disputed because it
created new rules (explicitely forbidding all-digits TLDs) without a
good reason. The document has fallen in disinterest and I'm quite
surprised to see it resurfacing now: we have IDN TLDs in the root for
a long time and the sky has not fallen.

I hope that ICANN will ignore this statement.