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And, as Jon Postel once said, "this is a naming system, not a general 
directory assistance system". So, like Ron explicated, there is 
absolutely no need to behave under a domain in such a way as to respect 
necessary and sufficient conditions for semantic equivalence (or 
non-contradiction) with the stated meaning of the string.

Jon Postel's obvious wisdom notwithstanding, by the time ICANN was created 
the view of most was that the DNS for Web URLs was exactly such a directory 
service. So many many problems we now have are explainedd by that view 
becoming dominant. It should also be noted, though, that when Dr Postel made 
his statement, the Web wasn't in existence and Hypertext generally was in its 
infancy.

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In any case, under the financial conditions of new gTLD applications, 
gunning for a .peadophile TLD might not be all that rationnal. I'm 
guessing that the high price tag on new gTLD application is protection 
enough for obviously inesthetical or frivolous TLD registration (am I 
already contradicted by experience?).

Oh, I agree completely that it's highly unliklely that under the current 
funding proposals .paedophile is unlikely to be suggested. However, it used 
to cost $200 pa (when $200 was worth more, as well) to register a domain 
name, and within a couple of years it came down to $20. Basing our 
acquiescence to a framework on the initially prohibitive cost (which we've 
already complained about in respect of, for example, developing economies) 
would possibly leave us with egg on our faces should the price quickly drop 
to $10,000 or $1,000 in a few years.

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Obviously, i can see that we could want to "give-a-little" on such 
issues to the GAC if they are sleepless about it and, in turn, are 
menacing some other area of import to us (i have no example, and am 
merely speaking in the abstract). Conversely, they must always be on the 
lookout to expand their reach, so from this perspective, then we are 
obviously at odds with them ...

Whether and how much to compromise is always part of real-politik in such 
situations, but often in ICANN we seem to find ourselves with a strong view 
which ICANN doesn't share and so the question them comes as to whether 
sticking to the strong case gets us no say in what actually happens or 
whether it means the end result is slightly less bad. The danger of the 
current proposal from staff is that we're not just giving a little, but 
creating something at least as bad as the worst excesses of UDRP and possibly 
much worse. The compromise suggested at the start of this discussion in 
NCSG/NCUC is already giving a little, and we have the joint support of ALAC 
for the stance of giving a little to avoid giving away most if not all of the 
field.

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Andrew, how does internationalisation mix in? phishing attempt by way 
of, say, cyrillic caracaters? Then i guess i would support objections 
based on "confusing similarity" with another tld.

This is one of the issues about internationalisation, certainly. THere are 
potentially many others. Roman representations for systems without the 
character set comes to mind. There was a (in)famous example of a two-letter 
encoding of Veitnamese used before Unicode was common where two of the most 
common phonemes in Vietnamese were represented as "IT" and "SH", leading to 
all sorts of fun with GENie (IIRC) English bad-language filters. There's the 
"scunthorpe" issue multiplied into other languages (take letters 2-5 of that 
UK place name if you don't know this one: the French equivalent word uses an 
"o" instead of a "u" and the ISP in question allowed "sconthorpe" but not 
"scunthorpe" to be registered as a userid). I don't know of any, but there 
may well be Japanese/Chinese kanji/hanzi words where it's normal in one 
language but rude and offensive in the other.

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