Public Comment

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.

Name: Louis Houle
Date: 22 Nov 2021
Affiliation: GNSO
1. Overall, does the proposal meet its goal of defining Internationalized Domain Name (IDN) labels for the Latin script that are suitable for the root zone?
Yes

If you selected no, please explain why.

>>PointQuébec must respectfully disagree with the conclusion that e with acute (é) and e are not variants. In general with the decision to consider diacritics as irrelevant for variant purposes. While the characters are different from a grammatical and typographic point of view, nobody in Québec, or, as we see it, elsewhere, would consider domain.quebec and domain.québec as different, seprate domains, nor, in fact, québec.domain and quebec.domain. Internet users simply got used to write without diacritics as those special characters were not available, first, and not widely used, later. But they are perfectly equivalent in their mind, and their usage. PointQuébec applied in the 2012 round for .quebec and has been running the Registry since 2014. It has always offered IDNs at the second level as bundles with optional activation: i.e. québec.quebec and quebec.quebec are treated as variants of the same domain. In the 2012 round TLDs in ASCII were not allowed to indicate any future variant, for the purely formal reason that the LGR system now being developed did not exist yet, and somebody apparently thought that ASCII and Latin Script were exactly the same. We firmly believe this must be corrected now and respecfully request that the discussion on at very least “e" and “é" with acute as variants, but more generally, diacritics and base characters as variants be reopened. Point Québec wants the Latin Script committee to express a request to modify the report to include in the Latin GP script thant the letter é (No 47 : code 00E9) as a variant of the ASCII «e» without an accent but more generally, diacritics and base characters as variants be reopened. >> >> Thank you for considering our request.

2. In your view, are there any required technical changes to the proposal? Please list them and include explanations.

See NO 1

Summary of Submission

Point Québec wants the Latin Script committee to express a request to modify the report to include in the Latin GP script thant the letter é (No 47 : code 00E9) as a variant of the ASCII «e» without an accent

PointQuébec wants to inform the Latin Script committee that the GeoTld «.Québec» with the acute accent should be considered as a variant of «.Quebec» without an accent. It was not possible to successfully apply for the name with an accent in 2012, unfortunately. We strongly believe that, from a worlwide French community perspective, the letter «é» (No 47 : code 00E9) is a simple variant of the ASCII «e» without an accent.