30 November, 2010

Variant Management: Why the delay?

The China Internet Network Information Center (CCNIC) writes:

We find that the progress on exploring solutions to variant management seems paused and even drawn back according to this AGB. We have growing concerns about whether it's compliant with ICANN's Bylaw to avoid this challenge of variant management (in particular variant involved delegation), especially when it's affecting billions of global users' right of using the Internet.  For Chinese users, Simplified Chinese and Traditional Chinese are ONE language and they are identical. Based on millions of Chinese users' right of using the Internet and their usability and readability, we encourage and welcome paired delegation of Simplified Chinese and Traditional Chinese gTLDs.

Considering millions of Chinese users' interest and right of accessing both online content in SC or TC, any attempt to separate SC from TC would constitute a cultural segregation because it shall lead to user confusion and result in the marginalization of millions of users who view SC and TC as essentially identical.

On the other hand, allowing SC and TC strings identically adopted as IDN TLDs offers tremendous convenience to Chinese users whose keyboards, input methods, and sometimes display methods support only one or the other. Some research has shown that Chinese users expect both versions of domain names to be held and used by the same registrant. A survey conducted by CNNIC in 2009 indicated that 95 percent of respondents are eager to own pure Chinese domain names. Based on this research, we strongly oppose delegating only one version of a Chinese gTLD to an applicant, which will surely deprive the registry operator, CDN registrants, and Chinese users worldwide of the right to properly use CDNs.

NOTE:  The Board Briefing Materials on Variant Management may be found here (starting at page 8).

No comments:

Post a Comment