Multiple people have made the argument that having a browser show A-labels ("punycode") instead of U-labels ("regular IDN") is desirable as a way of fighting phishing.

My rebuttal has three parts:

1. The underlying problem is that the registry (here, .com) permitted registration of a domain name which was confusable with another one. The right place to fight this kind of phishing with confusable characters is at the domain registry level.
2. Even if you could magically prevent all confusable 2nd-level domain name registrations, phishing would still be a problem. Fraudsters have many tools, confusable 2nd-level names is only one of them. There are also confusable names at the 4th or 5th levels (e.g. microsoft.com.innocuous.deceptive.com), and misleading links in message bodies, and so on.
   
3. The people for whom A-labels instead of U-labels are a privileged set of latin-script reading Internet users. The second billion internet users will predominantly be people who read a different script than latin. U-labels are a requirement for them to have legible domain names for legitimate sites. A-labels mean they don't get domain names which they can read. And they deserve to be able to read their domain names and email addresses.
   

This is an excellent audience for me to test my rebuttal. Is it solid?  Can I improve it?  

Cheers,
     —Jim DeLaHunt, Vancouver, Canada

All,

   I am aware of the good work going on in the UASG to get IDN at all levels natively supported in web-adresses and email and I fully support that. 

On the other hand there is darker side of the web that people want to be protected from. 

I just read this blog about some people that may actually find it better to see puny-code in stead of regular IDN in order to detect spam and phishing.

https://ma.ttias.be/show-idn-punycode-firefox-avoid-phishing-urls/ which is an opposite view of what UASG is trying to achieve.

   Does/Will the UASG have a standpoint in this matter ? Is this in scope of UASG or will we rely on the anti-virus industry or even registrars/registries to protect the world from abuses like this ?

Best regards,

Ron Geens

DNS Belgium

-- 
    --Jim DeLaHunt, jdlh@jdlh.com     http://blog.jdlh.com/ (http://jdlh.com/)
      multilingual websites consultant

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