Subject: RE: [idn] Alpha Online

From: "McDonald, Ira" <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 6 Feb 2002 16:09:14 -0800

Hi,

My two cents...

There are lots of postings here (I just rejoined this mailing list)
presuming that case sensitive domain names are reasonable or even
desirable.

Yet RFC 1035 "Domain Names - Implementation and Specification" says
(on page 8):

    Note that while upper and lower case letters are allowed in domain
    names, no significance is attached to the case.  That is, two names with
    the same spelling but different case are to be treated as if identical.

And RFC 2616 "HTTP/1.1" in section 3.2.3 "URI Comparison says 
(on page 20):

    When comparing two URIs to decide if they match or not, a client
    SHOULD use a case-sensitive octet-by-octet comparison of the entire
    URIs, with these exceptions:

       - A port that is empty or not given is equivalent to the default
         port for that URI-reference;

>>>>     - Comparisons of host names MUST be case-insensitive;

         - Comparisons of scheme names MUST be case-insensitive;

         - An empty abs_path is equivalent to an abs_path of "/".

It's likely that the attempt to retroactively introduce case sensitive
domain names will simply break almost all deployed Internet software.

Cheers,
- Ira McDonald
  High North Inc

-----Original Message-----
From: D. J. Bernstein [mailto:[email-masked]]
Sent: Wednesday, February 06, 2002 5:28 PM
To: [email-masked]
Subject: Re: [idn] Alpha Online

The question remains: Will an Alpha Online organization be allowed to
register qol.com, with q changed to a lowercase alpha?

Or will ICANN take the domain name away and give it to AOL, because the
uppercase version of the name is visually identical to AOL.COM? Is it
okay if Alpha Online never uses the uppercase version of the name, and
client software doesn't automatically convert names to uppercase?

The question is whether case insensitivity will---beyond imposing huge
software costs and creating huge new opportunities for fraud---prevent
legitimate users from registering perfectly reasonable domain names.

Dave Crocker writes:
> predictions about trademark disputes are best left to experienced
> trademark attorneys.

I will readily agree that the exact definition of ``likelihood of
confusion'' in trademark law is beyond your legal experience. However,
I'm sure you can grasp the fact that the picture

   AOL.COM

has a conflict with the identical picture

   AOL.COM

even though one of the A's is represented inside a computer as the Latin
A while the other one is represented as the Greek Alpha.

---Dan

---

From: [email-masked] <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 7 Feb 2002 09:01:45 +0800

Hi ! All:
              I think there are some confusing in here.
1.People using non-ASCII want their non-ASCII characters after ACE encoding
can keep the information of  original character case in the
ASCII-ACE-STRING.
2.The alphabet case of ASCII-ACE-STRING can be preserved and keep in
communication .
3.The comparison of  ASCII-ACE-STRING is still case insensitive in DNS and
URI.
4.That is say to do ASCII-STRING comparison in DNS or URI must forced the
ASCII-ACE-STRING to lower case and can not be recovering of these original
information FOREVER  is over requirement/specification.
5.No one want to violate the backward compatibility of DNS and URI.

L.M.Tseng

---

From: "D. J. Bernstein" <[email-masked]>
Date: 7 Feb 2002 01:57:34 -0000

> domain names will simply break almost all deployed Internet software.

You are misreading the proposal.

Software will treat uppercase ASCII and lowercase ASCII as equivalent,
for interoperability with existing configurations. However, software
will not adopt the new insensitivity rules for non-ASCII characters.
Uppercase Beta, for example, won't be automatically converted into
lowercase beta.

Registries will prohibit uppercase non-ASCII characters. Users will
stick to lowercase characters. Consequently we'll have the flexibility
to add case-insensitivity later _if_ that turns out to be a good idea.

Case insensitivity is quite a bit of added work for implementors, and it
dramatically expands the number of opportunities for visual confusion,
as well as the severity of the confusion. The only counterargument is
the unjustified speculation that users are too stupid to handle a world
of case-sensitive names---even though URLs are already case-sensitive,
specifically in path names.

Do you think that the unjustified speculation outweighs the big
problems? Are you so sure about this that you support making an
irreversible decision right now?

The careful approach is to start with lowercase IDNs. Registries will
allow a carefully selected set of characters. It will be possible to
expand the set later, when we have more experience, but for the moment
we'll stick to something safe. Similar comments apply to Chinese.

---Dan