NEW DELHI , INDIA : The Indian experience with Internationalized Domain Names and possible lessons for global implementation of IDNs will be front and center at a workshop at the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers 31st International Public Meeting slated for 13 February 2008 at 11 am local time. “ICANN’s IDN program is [...]
NEW DELHI , INDIA: Internet issues from around the world are front and center in India as the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers opened its 31st International Public Meeting today in New Delhi. “This year is an important one for the future of ICANN. The U.S. government is in the middle of its [...]
IDNs are one of the critical factors for democratisation and universalisation of the Internet. It has already introduced 13 language test names, including in the Devanagari and Tamil scripts. Its meeting is being held in New Delhi.
Like most original internet standards, the DNS was designed to initially suit the needs of any section of the world that could communicate using 7-bit ASCII and Latin character sets. Then the internet became really popular. Everywhere. The DNS had to evolve to cope with naming schemes that came from alphabets all over the world.
All successful internet protocols are elegant and simple by design. This makes it possible to retro-fit great ideas someone has one. Internationalisation was proposed in 1992, and it eventually became possible to register Internationalised Domain Names (IDNs) in the .com space in 2003. Standards move slowly on the internet!
IDN is up for discussion again at the 31st ICANN meeting on Monday. This time, the world’s registry community are meeting in New Delhi, one of the most significant IT regions of the non-Latin world, to discuss the remaining “glitch” in the IDN system. An IDN might look like this: 
.com. Therefore any user still needs to be able to type .com in order to reach the resource they request. There is a proposal at the ICANN meeting to add Internationalised top-level domains, actual complimentary TLDs to .com, that will mean that resources can be reached in any supported alphabet.
This is interesting stuff. One school of thought is that this could significantly assist the development of electronic enterprise in many more pockets of the world. The supremacy of Silicon Valley as the web’s main economy would then be broken. I think differently – I think that .com is now too established as the main ecommerce ‘brand’ TLD, and attempts to localise the meaning of .com will be fruitless. .com means “I trade online”. Despite .biz and similar TLDs being equal in technical terms, they are not equal in the eyes of shoppers or traders. .com now has specific global meaning, and can’t be diluted.
With normal spoofing a scammer tries to get personal information by sending fraudulent emails masquerading as an official website an individual might be working with. While some fall for the deception, many know better since the domain name in the email doesn’t resemble the domain name they usually use to access whatever site. However, what [...]
The procedures to apply for registration or to sponsor a new gTLD or new ccTLD or IDN TLD are not defined (with simple steps to follow) on the website icann.org.
Similarly there should be pre-defined but easy procedure to apply for membership for the ICANN, GNSO and other Councils and Organizations. For example when we locate that how we can join, we found that Membership of the ccNSO is limited to ccTLD Managers (see ICANN Bylaws Article IX (4)(1)). Where as ccTLD Managers can be only nominated by the representative pre-registered ccTLD Registrars.
read more
ICANN hears this question all the time at meetings, events, in different online forums, on the idn.icann.org wiki, and in emails and phone calls. The great challenge is it the answer isn’t the specific “as of this date” answer so many people want to hear. Because of the nature of some critical functions that still [...]
Yesterday, Dominik Mueller discussed this topic and released some traffic stats from one of his readers. I have been wanting to discuss this subject for sometime now. I do not not know much about IDNs and was hoping for readers to share some insight on these. I have no doubt in my mind that IDNs receive type-in traffic [...]
Do you know what IDNs are?
IDNs are “Internationalized Domain Names”. All domain names are spelled in English but to us speakers of the English language (many of us native and our only language), it never occurs to us that the rest of the world is essentially typing their domains in a language different to the [...]
Quick follow-up on my post about IDNs from few days ago:
In the post I wrote that IDNs have not performed all-too well traffic-wise, in my experience. However, I asked a fellow German domainer, Nico Zeifang, who owns some high-value IDNs, for his opinion on this topic. He was so kind to share his experiences and some traffic numbers in the post’s comments [...]
