Subject: Example of dns (non) fun

From: [email-masked] (Dan Kolis)
Date: Mon, 4 Dec 2000 17:00:41 -0500

In the present regime, its not surprising the frist below does not resolve
and the second does:

http://www.déjà.fr/
http://www.deja.fr/

In the proposed regime, its not obvious what to do from a purely consumer
point of view. Verisigns view would be each is completely unique. ICANN's
dispute resolution would say there completely identifical and one has to go!
But ICANN's resolution makes this problem appear in the first place.

Whoops, its not pretty.

Dan K

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From: Rick H Wesson <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 4 Dec 2000 15:22:50 -0800 (PST)

Dan,

actually your urls could be:

  http://www.bq--aduwvya.fr/
  http://www.deja.fr/

a application may render the bq--aduwvya.fr as déjà.fr or it may not.
Finally it would be up to the URDP process or the courts as to *if* the
two domains are the same. We shouldn't worry what the URDP or the courts
may or may not do.

-rick

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From: Karl Auerbach <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 4 Dec 2000 15:58:25 -0800 (PST)

> two domains are the same. We shouldn't worry what the URDP or the courts

Yes, the issue of "equivalence" extends well beyond what we can do in the
technical realm -- for instance "red ball" and "bal rouge" can be
considered equivalent for certain purposes (such as certain parts of
trademark law.)

I'd hate to be the one who has to write the library function
int strcmp_that_statisfies_everybody();

My own preference is to create a flexible mechanism (perhaps with some
degree of character set canonicalization) and let the courts, lawyers,
legislatures, etc try to figure out how to overlay restrictive
interpretations.

		--karl--

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From: [email-masked] (Claus Färber)
Date: 05 Dec 2000 15:26:00 +0100

> http://www.deja.fr/

This is really not new at all. Today, we do already have domains that  
are very similar: foobar.com vs. foo-bar.com vs. foobarr.com vs. ...
foobar.com vs. foobár.com is not much different.

Claus

-- 
http://www.faerber.muc.de