RE: [idn] Alpha Online

["McDonald, Ira" <imcdonald@sharplabs.com>]

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:djb@cr.yp.to]
Sent: Wednesday, February 06, 2002 5:28 PM
To: idn@ops.ietf.org
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