Good stuff. Some interesting points raised.

Are there any cultural reasons why a second-choice TLD, such as .???, would be an unacceptable alternative?

I can imagine UK users being upset if we had to settle for something culturally meaningless like “.ukm” because .uk looked too much like an existing ccTLD. But I think it would be far less objectionable if we were given .gbr instead of .gb.

Is ?? used in Bulgaria in a similar way? Do any of the alternatives have meaning?

Is ?? the proper name for Bulgaria, or just an abbreviation? If the latter, is it so common that it should be used as the TLD instead of the proper name?

According to Wikipedia (an admittedly flawed source), the proper name of Bulgaria is ????????. That seems like a better TLD, at least to my non-Bulgarian eyes.

For context, I looked at a few strings next to Bulgaria’s and noticed some slight similarities, but we seem to work past these in the western-iso character uses.

?? gr br gt bt ht hr

In reading what I what seemed to me like a very well articulated description by Vassil of the differences, I also realized that there are two entirely different keyboards and languages that would be used by the average web user that might visit any of these websites.

I’d see it more likely to confuse company.hr with company.br visually.  These are possible to compose without switching entry systems when typing a location.  ‘H’ and ‘B’ are reasonably close keyboard neighbors on a US ‘QWERTY’ type keyboard.

On the other hand, it seems rather impossible to typo the two strings br and ??.  You have to, on most keyboards, deliberately toggle between character composition in western and native character sets.

If one were composing in Cyrillic characters for the TLD, they are 99.999% likely to be composing the entire string in Cyrillic.  If the user is composing in English or Portuguese, an entirely different string composition would be happening.

I find it extremely unlikely that someone would deliberately cross-compose these character sets.  Most competent browsers expose the punicode (xn—blahblahblah) when strings cross code pages like this, so it is not as though the end user will be tricked in some phishing or otherwise nefarious manner.

It seems to me very likely that if .?? constrained its registrations to Cyrillic pages, and identified those code points to application developers, this should create separate walled areas for each rich culture to experience the internet in their native language.

For whatever my input is worth, I think this is worth a second look before declining .?? IF it is possible to perhaps recommend a constrained character set.

I think the thing to note is that under current ccTLD policy, there is no mandatory coordination between the operators of “.br” and “.??” to guard against conflicts, and ICANN is not in a position to enforce registration rules in a specific country due to the way registration policy is delegated to countries in ccTLD-space. Therefore, while honest registrants may have no need to register potentially confusing names across the two namespaces, it is not honest registrants that confusingly similar guards are designed to protect against. Let’s assume “??” and “ab” are two country-code domains. Who is to say .?? won’t have a policy that permits com.?? to be registered by someone who wishes to use ae.com.?? for confusing similarity to ae.com.ab?

No hat, just trying to focus the problem space.

The ISO 3166 ccTLDs are there and exist, many with legacy relationships that are what they are with RFC1591 etc.  For all intents and purposes, these just all simply exist and are what they are.

I wouldn’t suggest retrofitting .BR or any existing ccTLD with anything, but because there are new TLDs being created, these could have new self-imposed rules.

The newcomer could find a way to make it work within the existing framework of strings.  Better put, they’d be motivated to do so because it would help their likelihood of the application moving forward.  In this case it would be submitting the codepages and characters that would be legal within that new IDN ccTLD.

So hypothetically, if an applicant who were declined in an initial IDN ccTLD application where there were conflict, and they saw a means to reduce or eliminate said conflict in a reasonable manner, would it stand to reason that the initial basis for the application’s denial might be reconsidered?

The author is correct in assuming ICANN should review the terms “confusingly similar” based on the way it will be used, to be more precise, in the way it may be abused.

Having a new IDN TLD look similar to a ccTLD poses a security risk for phishing. Even today similar domain names are used to defraud customers and make them think they actually reached the right address. Many users will only check look at the address once and if it is similar to what they expect, they would not think twice about entering their payment details into, say: paypal.?? instead of paypal.com.br.

Saying that .br currently only allows registrations in the third level just confuses the issue. First, the policy may be changed tomorrow (see the liberalization of .co), rendering your point moot. Second, many people cannot be expected to know which levels domains are free for registration in what TLD. Many TLDs offer second and third level domain names (say .com.fr and .fr).

I believe .?? is confusingly similar to .br. Maybe not for those fluent in the cyrillic alphabet, but for those not fluent in it, it will be as it looks very similar at first glance and the first glance is the only review many domain names get from the user. Considering the asian region where many users only learn western characters as a second alphabet, there is even more potential for confusion.

It is not reasonable for ICANN to deny .?? to Bulgaria. Instead they should issue this TLD with some simple conditions that .?? will not allow the following 4 domain names to be registered. sot.bg, som.bg, iet.bg and pet.bg because in Cyrillic, these could be confused with com.br (???.?? ???.??) and net.br (???.??, ???.??).
These may not appear that confusing on your screen depending on the Cyrillic font but the confusion comes from the fact that lower case italic “t” looks like “m” in most fonts, and lower case italic “p” looks like “n” in many fonts.

In fact, the conditions could simply specify that these confusing domains should be registered for free in perpetuity to registro.br and its successors. For the future, if registro.br decides to open up a new 2nd level domain, it would be up to them to avoid confusing ones, and if they choose one that is not registered in .?? then they should also get a free registration under the same terms. This free registration should be limited to no more than 10 3-character or 2-character 2nd level domains. Or maybe registro.br should get right of first refusal on any .?? registrations for 2 or 3 character 2nd level domains.

The point is that this is not sufficient reason to deny a registration, just reason to set some reasonable conditions and require that registro.br is happy with them.

Also, one point missed was that Cyrillic has a letter ? which in most fonts looks identical to English “b”. Therefore anyone who reads Cyrillic would never confuse ?? with br because that first letter can only be ? not ?.

And a lot of the 280 million Russian speakers in the world can read and understand a lot of Bulgarian content so this is not just an issue about a small country of 7 millon. I speak Russian as a second language and I can read an arbitrary Bulgarian language site and understand about 70% at first reading. Most languages using a Cyrillic alphabet are Slavic languages and the differences between them are more like between Italian and Spanish, especially the written languages. So please do not think of this as a minority language issue. Ukrainian, Belarussian, Serbian and Russian also use Cyrillic.

Could paypal.?? really be an issue?

Not if .?? requires fully Cyrillic domain names.

??????.?? is about the closest that you can get. Compare with
paypal.br