Internationalised Domain Names European Work

1
Internationalised Domain NamesEuropean Work

• Gabriella Schittek Kim Davies CENTR
• Montreal
• 24 June 2003

2
CENTR IDN Workshop

• Held in May
• Forum for discussing IDN implementation
• Strong turnout of members

3
Registry plans

• VeriSign
• Gave information on its plans for making IDNs
  available for customers
• Has written free software that it has released to
  encourage takeup of IDNs.
• Free software code is available to programmers
• Free software plugin for Microsoft Windows that
  makes IDNs work in Internet Explorer.
• Possibility of making the source code available
  to CENTR members for inspection other forms of
  cooperation

4
Registry plans

• Norway (.no, .sj) has developed registry policies
  for IDN currently being reviewed. Consulted
  national language bodies and have defined policy.
• France (.fr, .re) has developed policies. IDNs
  approved by their board for implementation
  policy still to be defined. Also developed a
  restricted set of code points to handle French.
• Poland (.pl) to deploy with no restrictions.
• Iran (.ir) to allow trial registrations this
  year, with first real production registrations
  in March 2004.

5
Some deployment challenges

• Israel
• Problems with bi-directional support in browsers.
• www.sample.co.il ? www.????.??.il
• If sample and com are R2L (Hebrew), then they
  get handled incorrectly end up with wrong
  logical order www.????.??.il (i.e.
  www.oc.elpmas.il)
• Greece
• Converting upper to lower case doesnt work well
  for Greek, because lower-case uses accents, upper
  case does not
• S?G??????S.gr ? xn--mxaddcbou6cpi.grse??eda???.gr
  
• se??ed????.gr ? xn--hxandcbou6cpi.gr
• Issue may apply for other languages/scripts,
  similar issues for other variances.

6
Policy direction (well, almost)

• Most registries likely to implement policies that
  have
• Language specific policies, i.e. one rule for
  German characters, one rule for French
  characters, etc.
• Variant tables, i.e. list of confusing
  alternative letters are blocked, (e.g. oöø)
• This is generally in line with ICANN guidelines
  under development

7
Survey of CENTR members

• Approx. 50 plan to have IDN registrations this
  year
• Most plan to support official languages in
  country only (at least in first phase)
• For example,
• .lu French, German, Letzeburgish
• .ch French, German, Italian, Rætroromantsch
• Most intend to reuse policies from other
  registries (preferably those that know the
  language best) for non-local languages

8
Forum for discussion

• No real desire to create more and more groups
  working on IDNs, but also realised that worldwide
  councils dont achieve much and regional effort
  more fruitful (with common issues)

9
Important Consideration

• Legal issue European Union may require
  universal access to EU languages. EU countries
  may need to support all EU languages?
• Issue passed to LR Group
• Related local laws may require certain
  languages be supported.

10
Conclusions

• Key challenge is education
• End-users, ISPs, registrars need to understand
  details.
• No-one really has plans on how to tackle that
  yet.
• Believed there should be a central reference on
  IDN efforts, progress
• CENTR will compile what it knows and see what
  grows
• Continue to act as a forum for European policy
  development/discussion.
• Agreed to share findings with others working on
  deployment.
• Mailing list created
• Work on variant tables/bundles ( language
  scripting semantics)
• Create definition of characters, mappings,
  confusing alternatives, etc.
• Consider language use in other jurisdictions
• e.g. French is used in Canada, Africa,
  everywhere, etc.