ICANN approves non-English domains

27-03-2003

by Andrew McLindon

Internet domain names in languages such as Chinese and Arabic could be available within the next few weeks or months, according to ICANN.

Vint Cerf, the chairman of the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN), which oversees technical issues related to the Internet address system, said the organisation had been working on introducing domain names with non-Roman characters for over two years and real progress had been made.

Speaking on Wednesday at an ICANN meeting in Rio de Janeiro, Cerf said that the technical standards for establishing "internalised domain names" are now ready, but policy work still needs to be completed.

The problem for ICANN has been that while the Internet is able to handle languages from around the world, address fields can generally only understand 26 English letters, 10 numerals, a hyphen, and a period. Other languages must be translated into strings of the permitted characters.

ICANN's Internationalised Domain Name Working Group has been looking at the situation for more than two years and, according to Cerf, the organisation should approve technical standards on Thursday.

However, how soon domains are made available in non-English languages depends on the work carried out to translate these languages into the appropriate code. In this regard, Cerf said that the Japanese, Chinese and Korean languages were most advanced.

"A great deal of progress was made this week and I hope we will see significant introductions as the weeks go by," said Cerf.

ICANN is concerned though that the introduction of such internationalised domains will pose "significant risks" for the domain name system. It is worried that it will lead to widespread user confusion and greater opportunities for cybersquatting. In order to avoid this, ICANN said that sensible registry-level policies should be adopted and consistent technical implementations across registries was needed.

ICANN has also been discussing the introduction of further top-level domains (i.e. .com, .org etc), but its outgoing president said he did not see much demand for them. "I don't want you to think that it's a given that everyone believes there should be more TLDs," Stuart Lynn told a press conference. He added that previous introductions of TLDs had been problematic.

Meanwhile, Lynn's replacement, Paul Twomey, has been outlining his vision for ICANN. As well as continuing Lynn's reforms of an organisation that is often seen as inefficient, the first non-American to hold ICANN's presidency said he want to encourage the advancement of the Internet in developing countries.

"We are entering a period where we need to be focused on the fact that the Internet is becoming more global and we need to focus on the global aspects, particularly developing countries," said Twomey, who is an Australian. ICANN has often been accused of being overly US-centric.