When he wanted to show the transformative and unifying power of the Internet to open this week’s ICANN meeting in Seoul, ICANN President Rod Beckstrom had an ace in the hole: Korean guitarist Jay (Jeong-hyun Lim), who became a global YouTube sensation with his hard-rocking version of Pachelbel’s Canon.

As I watched Jay wail on his gold-plated guitar to standing ovations, I couldn’t help but think of Rod waxing that the Internet was a “symphony” of ideas and voices from around the world.

Rod’s right, of course. The Internet is a symphony of ideas, and the challenge of ICANN has always been to help everyone hear what everyone else is playing.

Which is why it’s so perplexing to me that in one of ICANN’s biggest initiatives—the introduction of internationalized domains—the organization is trying to open a new symphony with most of the orchestra missing.

The single most important thing ICANN can do to expand the global reach of the Internet is the introduction of top-level domains in non-Latin character sets. Over half the world’s population uses alphabets other than Latin, so these internationalized domain names (IDNs) will finally let them read and write domain names and email addresses in their native languages.

But under ICANN’s current plan, the symphony heard by IDN users speakers will be a mere echo of the symphony that the rest of us enjoy. That’s because the only IDN domains initially allowed are in country-code domains controlled by governments, like China’s .cn, Syria’s .sy, and Iran’s .ir.

Under ICANN’s “fast-track” process, the IDN country-code domains go live first, while IDN versions of global domains like .com and .org will languish in bureaucratic process for at least another year.

It’s curious that Rod chose a YouTube sensation to demonstrate the Internet’s symphonic impact, because IDN users won’t be able to type in the equivalent of YouTube.com, the site that made Jay an international sensation.

That’s right. Jay was inspired by, and discovered on Youtube.com, but there won’t be a Youtube.com in Korean, or Chinese, or Arabic until 2011 at the earliest.

What’s troubling about all of this is that IDN users may have less access to the free and open Internet that the rest of us take for granted. That’s because country-code domains are subject to more government control than are global generic domains: a government can suspend any domain in its ccTLD registry if they don’t like the content or conduct. In the wrong hands, this can become a brutally effective tool for suppressing free speech and expression.

For example, if you want to reach Iranian citizens via a domain in their native Farsi script, only Iran’s government can give it to you now. A Farsi version of global domains like .com and org isn’t going to be available until 2011 at the earliest.

Iran allows .ir domains only to organizations legally represented in Iran, individuals residing in Iran, and others “whose activity and the use of the domain name are not in conflict with the laws, practices and interests of the Islamic Republic of Iran.” If you can get a .ir domain, don’t expect to stay online if your videos or comments are critical of Iran’s foreign policy or the conduct of their recent elections.

Still like the sound of the new IDN symphony that ICANN is conducting? Let’s raise our lighters and demand that ICANN let the rest of the musicians play, too.

Written by Steve DelBianco

Have you invested in .CN Domain Names? Right now, it does seem like it’s a sound and a valuable piece of internet real estate (with 338 million internet users) but situations have changed. The China Internet Network Information Center (CNNIC) has recently announced that China Language Domain Names (.中国) will soon be possible… … The […]

In their never-ending pursuit to evade spam filters, malevolent mailers have deployed a number of techniques to obfuscate their true intent. One of those techniques is using facsimiles of legitimate brand names in Web addresses to redirect victims to outlaw Internet sites where the scammers can work their mischief on their targets, a practice called […]

The Full Employment Act for Domain Name Practitioners, otherwise known as the new generic top-level domains (gTLDs) ‘internationalised domain names’ (IDN) program proposed by ICANN (the acronym obsessed, global domain name bureaucrats), could be active on the Internet by the end of 2010. Under this program, it is proposed that (in summary), generic, geographical and […]

One particularly important aspect of ICANN’s launch of new generic top-level domains (gTLDs) will be the availability of Internationalized Domain Names (IDNs) at the top level. That eagerly anticipated enhancement to Internet participation has also raised some issues.
For example, current practice dictates that gTLDs contain at least three characters – two-character Latin TLDs are […]

Hoy Javier Florentín (Dueños.net) me ha avisado por Facebook de que uno de sus dominios está siendo subastado en Sedo (la subasta finaliza el 15 de julio).
He pensado que tal vez sería interesante escribir este post porque me parece que hace ya un tiempo que no comentamos mucho sobre dominios .info y, en este caso […]

IDN, or Internalized Domain Name is a relative new addition by ICANN.
It allows foreign language domains – such as Chinese, Janpanese, Spanish, Hebrew, etc.
For example, McDonalds.com translated to Chinese would be 麥當勞.com
So in foreign countries such as China computer users would simply type in 麥當勞.com in their browsers.  It is the browser’s job to […]

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With the IDN work for Internationalized Domain Names using characters beyond ASCII, it is only natural to tackle the problem of Internationalized Internet eMail.

Some smart people have been working on an IETF working group to figure out how non-ASCII email would work, and I encourage people to take a look: http://www.ietf.org/html.charters/eai-charter.html.  That page has the charter, a list of drafts and RFCs that have already been produced, and links to the IMA working group mailing list.

Assuming you’re an ASCII/Latin character user, imagine having to type all your URL’s in Chinese, or Cyrillic (or if you know those, imagine typing everything in Klingon, eg:  )  In many cultures, that’s what it’s like to use the web.  Some users may not be literate in Latin letters, or may have to do a lot of hunt-n-pecking.  EAI should help address that problem.

How EAI/IMA Works

The basic idea of the EAI working group is to stick email in UTF-8 instead of ASCII.  UTF-8 works pretty well in many systems, and many mailers already handle 8 bit encodings, so this is a pretty “simple” solution.  Unfortunately email touches a lot of places, so there’re a lot of protocols that need updates (eg: STMP, POP, mailto:, etc.)  Additionally everyone knows that UTF-8 email can’t happen instantly, so there needs to be a system for existing servers to talk to UTF-8 aware ones, which leads to a few more RFCs.

UTF8SMTP allows the servers to make decisions about the “local” part of the email address, which allows for groups to fit their own needs.  The backwards compatibility means that users also need ASCII addresses, as they do today.  The server would alias from one address to another so mail to @microsoft.com could map to my normal mailbox, and I’d only have one mail.  Unfortunately that simple concept means that places that didn’t have to worry about aliasing before may now have to consider aliases and fallback addresses.  Contact lists may need to have both forms, etc.

Current Status of EAI/IMA

Currently there are several experimental RFCs, and several people have created interoperating systems that work with each other to demonstrate the feasibility of UTF8SMTP.   The next step is to move towards a standards track process, which could happen “reasonably quickly”.  I’m optimistic that the standards will move quickly, but sometimes these things take a while.

So Who’s Gonna Use It?

There are a lot of markets where ASCII doesn’t work very well for various reasons.  Even when people have ASCII aliases, it may seem artificial, and there may be a desire for an email that reflects them or their country.  There are many ISPs in countries like Korea, China, & Japan that are very eager to be able to send email in a native script.  Some governments like Russia and China are weighing in on the importance of being able to send mail and use the Internet in their script. 

What’s IMA Mean To Me As a Software Developer? (who cares?)

If you are a developer, then you may run into IMA addresses.  Even if your app doesn’t explicitly deal with mail, there may be a place for email to sneak into your app.  For example, IDN and domain names don’t really have much to do with Word or PowerPoint, yet they often show up in documents and presentations.  I could imagine an author address in metadata, such as a photographer contact in a photo’s metadata.  Many apps probably will run into IMA addresses whether they realize it or not.

Anyway, I have been thinking about this space for a while and thought I’d share my observations.  It’s worth considering what impact IMA will have on your application (while you’re at it, how’s IDN behave?)

 -Shawn

 

Ay dios mio! I think it’s awesome Sedo is doing a Spanish only domain auction. I got into domaining in early 2004, aka ‘real late’. The first thing I noticed was English .com’s were just plain GONE. Anything I tried was taken, if I was going to make any money in this business I was […]

By now, most companies have begun the process to understand how the introduction of new gTLDs (Generic Top-Level Domains) will impact their respective businesses. Some companies are considering submitting applications to operate their own branded gTLDs. Many others are focused on how to address the anticipated launch of new gTLDs defensively, in terms of application […]