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.שלום.קו.il • If ‘sample’ and ‘com’ are R2L (Hebrew), then they get handled incorrectly – end up with wrong logical order www.שלום.קו.il(i.e. www.oc.elpmas.il) • Greece • Converting upper to lower case doesn’t work well for Greek, because lower-case uses accents, upper case does not • ΣΕΓΡΕΔΑΚΗΣ.grxn--mxaddcbou6cpi.grσεγρεδακης.gr • σεγρεδάκης.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. oöøœ) • 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 don’t 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 L&R 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.