Public Comment is a vital part of our multistakeholder model. It provides a mechanism for stakeholders to have their opinions and recommendations formally and publicly documented. It is an opportunity for the ICANN community to effect change and improve policies and operations.
Please provide your rationale and/or proposed changes:
The intrinsic purpose of the PDP is to deal with natural (partial) equivalences of Latin script strings. Dealing with such equivalences is necessary for the protection of internet users at large and, in some cases, is also in the interest of domain holders. Preliminary Recommendation 1 is the wrong way. It inappropriately defines the PDP's scope as excluding the proper handling of characters like the LATIN SCRIP SMALL LETTER AE or the LATIN SCRIPT SMALL LETTER O WITH STROKE. The reason cited has nothing to do with the task at hand: it is irrelevant if a character can be "decomposed" into 7-bit ASCII letter and a diacritic. The following are examples of equivalences that should be in scope for the PDP. møller = moller mærsk = maersk łodz = lodz đakovo = dakovo Existing examples of the application of the same entity principle with delegation of 2 variants on the top level include the IDN ccTLDs for China (.中国 / .中國) and Taiwan (.台湾 / .台灣). In both of these existing cases, we are dealing with equivalences. The respective equivalent characters are not "decomposable" from a UNICODE standpoint, and they are not very similar visually. Their equivalence is a fact that a large number of users have learned, as opposed to one that is intrinsically recognizable from the glyphs' shape or from the way they are encoded in UNICODE. The same principle needs to be applied in the Latin script. It is not a matter of diacritics, nor is it one of "decomposability". It is simply a matter of whether, in an online context, a sufficient number of users will consider one string as practically equivalent to another in a context of online communications.