[everydaypanos]

Why is it even allowed to register "epic.com" with e|p|i|c cyrillic when it is already registered with english/ascii??

They look exactly the same, they are the same characters just borrowed from one language to another..

It should just be illegal to register same-character domains. All other solutions that force browser vendors to "do something about it" are implying that the web is in english all other languages are just addons.

[nothrabannosir]

It's about separation of concerns. Who defines what is the same and what is not? It's computers, so you need to be clear about this. You can't emulate our judicial process, here: make a law with a spirit and define the corner cases as they get litigated.

You already mention this yourself: you don't want the browsers to "do something about it." Ok, but somebody has to. So, if not the browsers, then ICANN. But they would be using the very same algorithm, in the end, no? If so, then why not have the browsers do that, in the first place? They have more control over UI, and it is a cleaner separation of concerns and responsibility.

Somebody needs to do something. And because this is about humans (in the end, when you say "similar looking", you mean "... to humans"), better have that be in the part of the system that actually is about them: the user agent. ICANN is too slow to be able to rapidly adapt to changes in this fight.

[everydaypanos]

The truth of the matter is that e|p|i|c are actually the same characters just borrowed from one language to another.

If I give you a piece of paper with "epic -> epic" you would say "it says epic two times".

If we give the same piece of paper to a Russian he will say "it says <insert Russian meaning here> two times". The Russian guy may even say it says epic(as in the English meaning) because there might be no "epic" word in Russian.

In short: It all depends on the reader how he interprets the characters e|p|i|c. The same should apply to computers too.

The lowercase a is the same character in French, Russian, English etc. The fact that some decades ago some computer inventors decided that there are four types of "a" depending on the language - that's completely broken in my opinion.

I don't think and I don't see any use of embedding the belonging language to every character. For me, this is obviously like an encoding "flaw".

So the ones that actually have to do something are the OS vendors. If they don't then ICANN or browser vendors should do something..