Internationalization of Domain Names Multilingual Domain Names: Joint ITU / WIPO Symposium International Conference Center of Geneva (CICG) December 6-7, 2001 James Seng CTO, i-DNS.net International co-chair, IETF IDN Working Group

Internationalized Domain Names 华人. 公司.cn 華人. 商業.tw 高島屋. 会社.jp 삼성. 회사.kr 三星. 회사.kr الاهرام. م viagénie.qc.ca ישראל. קום ทีเอชนิค. พาณิชย์. ไทย 現代.com ヤフー.com

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IETF IDN Working Group Mailing List General Discussion: To subscribe: Archive: ftp://ops.ietf.org/pub/lists/idn* Website Chair James Seng Marc Blanchet

Primarily Goal From the charter “ The goal of the group is to specify the requirements for internationalized access to domain names and to specify a standards track protocol based on the requirements. ” BoF in Nov 1999, WG formed in Jan 2000 Spend 6 months gathering requirements draft-ietf-idn-requirements – Waiting for IESG action Update charter to include standard protocol specification in Jun 200

Where is IDN? Internet Protocol (IP) TCP/UDP HTTP DNS Snapshot of network layers to provide some Internet Service WWW URISMTP Mail Format IDN is here

Stability and Compatibility From the charter “ A fundamental requirement in this work is to not disturb the current use and operation of the domain name system, and for the DNS to continue to allow any system anywhere to resolve any domain name. ” IDN is changing a fundamental service IAB RFC2825 – “ Issues of I18N, Domain Names, and the other Internet protocols ” A lot of existing Internet Protocols assumed domain names and assumed that it is A-Z, 0-9 and “ - ” only

Confusions & Consensus Scripts v.s Language we deal with script in ISO10646 Internationalization, Localization and Multilingualism “ I ” in IDN is Internationalization Names v.s Identifier Domain Names is actually an Identifier Character Set Encoding ISO/IEC also known as Unicode Matching Normalization UTR#15 and Case Folding UTR#21

Action Items An Informational RFC specifying the requirements for providing International character sets in domain names. A standard track specification on permitting international characters in domain names, including specifying any transition issues. A standard track specification on an ASCII Compatible Encoding (ACE), to be used in the standard track specification on permitting international characters in domain names. A standard track specification on normalization of domain name identifiers for the purpose of string comparisons.

Number of Proposals (I-Ds) IETFProtocolMatchingEncodingOthers 46 – 11/99 Washington0(+1) – 03/00 Adelaide0(+1) – 06/00 Pittsburg6(+2)1(+2)34 49 – 12/00 San Diego81(+2)69 50 – 03/00 Minneapolis91(+3) – 08/00 London31(+3)34 52 – 12/01 Salt Lake City21(+3)12 NB: These are estimated numbers

Outstanding issues IDN Protocol DM-IDNS and IDNA Note: DM-IDNS is superset of IDNA Matching Localization in Nameprep ACE Reordering ACE prefix

But only the beginning … From the charter “ The group will not address the question of what, if any, body should administer or control usage of names that use this functionality ” Issues not deal with in IETF Trademark and Domain Name Dispute Policy Use of Symbols and drawing characters Policy on the delegation of IDN Other business issues? Deployment?

Conclusion Many problems This is not a simple problem But solutions are emerging No solution is perfect, engineering compromised Many confusions Took us many months to understand the issues but we figure it out More to come There are non-technical (e.g. policy & trademark) issues pending which cannot be deal with in IETF

Lastly Join the working group! All are welcome! with the word “ subscribe ”

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