IDNs in Norway

1

• IDNs in Norway
• wwTLD-meeting
• 26.03.2003
• Hilde Thunem

2
What is happening in Norway?

• Two main areas Technical (how do we make IDNs
  work?) and policy (rules for IDNs)
• Technical
• We will be following the IETF standard
• Policy
• A proposal is currently out for public comment by
  the Norwegian Internet community

3
Policy Internationalization has its costs

• DNS IETF standard handles all non a-z characters
  equally
• Technical consequences outside DNS
• Billing systems
• Whois
• Customer databases
• Administrative consequences
• User support both at the registry and at the
  registrar
• ADRP must handle all scripts that are allowed
  under the TLD

4
Policy Internationalization has its costs

• Legal consequences
• A larger namespace new opportunities for domain
  name pirates
• Characters that look the same
• ???????? Cyrillic
• BEHEMOTH Latin, Helvetica
• BEHEMOTH Latin, Times, italics, red
• Final important point
• IDNs will be used locally, for the local users of
  a language. Users without the relevant characters
  on the keyboard will probably hesitate to enter a
  IDN given them on a business card. Domain name
  holders that want to reach a global community
  will therefore probably still use a-z domains

5
Policy proposal on limiting the characters under
.no

• Only characters in written languages that has
  official status as Norwegian languages
• The letters a-z, numbers 0-9 and -
• The special Norwegian characters æøå
• In addition
• Bokmål and nynorsk (Norwegian language council)
• à, ç, è, é, ê, ñ, ò, ó, ô, ü, ä
• Sámi (Sámi council)
• Northern Sámi á, c, d, ?, š, t, ž
• Southern Sámi none
• Lule Sámi á and n
• Personal names (The Norwegian register of names)
• ä, é, è, ô, ö and ü
• Whether to use language variant tables will be
  considered after the Local Internet community has
  given its input on which languages that will be
  allowed

6
Transition mechanism

• Three choices
• The big bang
• Open at a given time, first come first served
• Draw lots
• Accept applications over a period, and then
  randomly determine the order they are treated in
• Give special rights to some
• Based on prior trademark rights, prior domain
  name registrations etc.

7
Policy proposal on transition for .no Draw lots

• Equal chances for everyone
• No special rights for holders of prior
  registrations. Todays policy explicitly states
  that registering a domain name does not give the
  holder any new rights that he did not already
  have
• Procedural strengths
• The registry may return wrong applications, and
  if there is still time the registrar can correct
  them and send them in again before the drawing
  commences
• Duplicate applications are eliminated, so that
  applicants need not go to lots of different
  registrars and fill up their capacity
• More robust for temporary technical problems at
  the registry or registrars
• It worked once (at the liberalization of .no)

8
More information

• Norids proposal
• www.norid.no/regelverk/forslag/idn-2003/
• Only in Norwegian, but English translation coming
  soon at www.norid.no/regelverk/forslag/idn-2003/in
  dex.en.html
• Hilde.Thunem_at_uninett.no
• www.norid.no/